These alterations are usually justified by and respond to the two related criteria of news relevance and background knowledge of the target reader. The effect of this kind of intervention on the source text is to make its translated version more like an original, new text, specifically suited to the needs of the publication in which it appears and the readers to which it is targeted. As María José Hernández Guerrero remarks, the outcome of the process of news translation is the creation of a new text, destined to function as 'news' for a different public according to the textual conventions of another language (2005: 130–31).

The news translator has been presented above as a re-creator, a writer. It is clear that the kind of intervention demanded by news translation on the original text modifies the traditional role of the translator in relation to both the author and the source text. Translators’ historical, cultural and socioeconomic dependence – their subordinate position in the cultural field – has been theorized in terms of their ingrained subservience 'to the client, to the public, to the author, to the text, to language itself' (Simeoni, 1998: 11–12).Stetting already pointed to the more interventionist role of the 'transeditor': 'if the translator decides to take on the more responsible role of "midwife" to see to it that the original intentions are reborn in a new and better shape in the target language, the translator turns into a "transeditor"’ (1989: 376). The transeditor, challenging the secondary position traditionally attributed to the translator in relation to the writer, 'is also likely to feel that her work is more rewarding, if it is more independent and more on a par with that of the writer' (1989: 377).

In the case of news translation which occupies us here, this role is none other than that of the journalist. Journalists who write original news reports are not any different from those who translate them. Moreover, the same person often combines both tasks indistinctively and translation is not felt to be something essentially dissimilar from other tasks involved in the production of news. Journalists tend to be initially surprised when they are asked about their role as news translators, because they do not see translation as a separate process from the edition of texts. It is only if they are led to do so by the researcher that they start reflecting on the specific nature of translation as such, and on the important part it plays in their everyday work and more generally in the production of news.

The journalist who writes a text does not possess a significantly different status from the journalist who translates it. Nor has the source text an essence that must be respected in the target text: it does not require that its form and content are preserved without significant alterations in translation, allowing the translator to adopt an interventionist role. The central importance of authorship, reflected in the sacrality of the original text, is a product of the autonomy of the literary field, and does not have an equivalent form in the highly heteronomous journalistic field. The news translator, unlike the literary translator, does not owe respect and faithfulness to the source text but is able to engage in a significantly different relationship with an often unsigned piece of news, the main purpose of which is to provide information of an event in a concise and clear way.

According to Pablo García Suárez, one of the main concerns of the news translator is the problem of objectivity rather than faithfulness to the source text, a feature that is particularly relevant and central in the translation of agency news, to which he refers:

en el caso de un traductor de textos periodísticos, y en concreto de un traductor que trabaja en el seno de una agencia de noticias, lo que resulta en cambio característico es que la fidelidad al texto original está subordinada a la fidelidad a los hechos relatados, lo cual permite en ocasiones, y siempre que exista una clara justificación, introducir alteraciones en el sentido, intolerables para un traductor especializado en otros campos; es decir, le obliga a simultanear su labor traductora con la labor de redactor periodístico.

                                             (2005: 175–76)

(in the case of a news translator, and specifically of a translator who works in a news agency, what is characteristic is that faithfulness to the original text is subordinated to faithfulness to the narrated facts, which on some occasions and whenever there exists a clear justification allows for the introduction of alterations of meaning, which are intolerable to a translator specialized in other fields; that is to say, it obliges the translator to combine his translating task with the task of a journalistic editor.)

The issue of objectivity and of the particular style of agency news will be dealt with in the next section. However, the question of to whom or what must the news translator be faithful is a key one because it leads us to reflect on the nature of news translation and its differences or deviations from other forms of translation, which ultimately respond and can be traced back to concepts of equivalence. No matter how debated and ultimately questionable the notion of equivalence might be, it continues to be a central concept in translation studies, maybe because in a way it defines what translation itself is taken to be. Theories of dynamic or communicative equivalence, in which the key notion becomes 'equivalent effect' rather than identity, questioned and significantly enlarged early notions of (formal) equivalence that corresponded more to the concept of word-for-word translation. Nevertheless, even with broad and, according to some, essentially inaccurate and unmeasurable concepts such as Eugene Nida's dynamic equivalence, fundamental problems appear when we try to apply them to news translation.