Approaches to news translation, a topic which has hardly been tackled in translation studies, are scarce. Moreover, many of the recently appeared contributions to the field consist of descriptive accounts from the point of view of experienced practitioners (García Suárez, 2005; Hursti, 2001; Tsai, 2005; Vidal, 2005). While these provide very valuable empirical accounts of translation practice in various news organizations and of the usual tasks and difficulties encountered by the translator of news, the need to systematically trace the theoretical implications from existing practice in very diverse organizations and the general principles that govern news translation remains. This section will delineate the main operations involved in the process of news translation, assess key concepts that have been proposed for describing this practice and critically discuss central issues in translation studies, such as equivalence and the notion of authorship that are problematized in news translation.

It could be argued that the main objective of news translation is the fast transmission of information in a clear way so that it can be communicated effectively to readers. Journalistic factors related to time, space and genre are as important as the linguistic and cultural aspects involved in the process of interlingual transfer. Bearing in mind the influence of the former, some major features which specifically characterize news translation and distinguish it from other forms have been pointed out:

1. The main objective of news translators is to transmit information.

2. News translators translate for a mass audience. Consequently, a clear and direct language needs to be used.

3. News translators translate for a specific geographical, temporal and cultural context. Their job is also conditioned by the medium in which they work.

4. News translators are subject to important limitations of time and space.

5. News translators are usually 'backtranslators' and proofreaders.

          (Maria Josefina Tapia, quoted in Hernández Guerrero, 2005b: 157–58)

To these can be added a necessary versatility, which enables news translators to work on an immense variety of topics, from sports to economy. The link between these diverse subjects is the journalistic medium itself and the norms of genre and style to which all those working in the field are subjected.

In translating news, journalists must rewrite texts to make them suitable for their new context according to the rules and practices of the medium in which they work. News translation entails a considerable amount of transformation of the source text which results in the significantly different content of the target text. On the other hand, the process of news translation is not dissimilar from that of editing, through which news reports are checked, corrected, modified, polished up and prepared for publication. In this context, Karen Stetting proposed the concept of transediting as 'a new term for

coping with the grey area between editing and translating' (1989: 371). While acknowledging that a certain amount of editing has always been part of the work of the translator, who needs to incorporate cultural and situational variations and who in many cases has to 'clean up' poor manuscripts, Stetting points to the fact that transediting is widely practised in certain types of translation to better suit the needs of the receivers: e.g. film and TV translation, TV interviews, written journalism, company and institutional brochures and PR material. Rather than adopting the somewhat artificial concept of transediting – the use of which would seem to imply the existence of another form of translating news – we will simply refer to news translation to point to this particular combination between editing and translating, and more specifically to the form that translation takes when it has become integrated in news production within the journalistic field.

It is worthwhile looking in some detail at the most frequent modifications to which the source text can typically be subjected in the process of translation in order to illustrate the type of textual intervention required from the news translator:

? Change of title and lead: titles and leads (informative subtitles) are often substituted for new ones so as to better suit the needs of the target reader or the requirements of the target publication.

? Elimination of unnecessary information: information can become redundant either because it is already known by the target readers or because it becomes too detailed and specific for a reader who is geographically and culturally removed from the reality described.

? Addition of important background information: when the target readers change it becomes necessary to add background information that will not necessarily be known in the new context.

? Change in the order of paragraphs: the relevance of the information in a new context and the style of the publication might make it necessary to alter the order of paragraphs.

? Summarizing information: this method is often used to fit the source text into the space available and to reduce lengthy paragraphs which are no longer fully relevant to the target readers.