In the article quoted above, Stetting had already identified this by pointing out that while equivalence is the central concern in the translation of cultural texts (by which she means high cultural or literary texts), the situation is different in the case of practical, everyday texts – defined as a wide range of non-fictional texts which include business materials and correspondence, advertising and journalistic texts – which are more open to 'interference' on the part of the translator (1989: 375).

Crucially, Anthony Pym has recently argued that

The sheer quantities of weakly authored material now being translated have brought about significant differences in the professional tasks of many trained mediators, who are writing summaries, revising, providing linguistic consultation services, producing new texts for new readers, post-editing controlled translations, or managing language services. In such fields, the regulated replacement of natural-language strings often has a priority lower than effectiveness and timeliness. Translations are thus to be assessed as new texts designed to serve new purposes, without any necessary constraint by equivalence.

            (2004: 55, emphasis added)

Pym’s analysis refers to the localization industry and his argument is that a localized text is not called to represent any previous text but it is rather part of a process of constant material distribution (2004: 5). This argument can similarly be applied to the translation (or localization) of news.

Equivalent effect is not preserved, for instance, when the news angle changes in translation, which is a perfectly normal operation in journalism if a new angle is justified according to the above-mentioned criteria of background knowledge and relevance. María José Hernández Guerrero gives an example of such a change in her study of the Spanish translation of a French report on the closure of part of the network of the Banque de France, which originally appeared in Libération. After commenting on the numerous changes, such as the transformation of title and lead and the elimination and addition of some information, she concludes: ‘la función del original y traducción es la misma: informar, pero lo hacen desde una perspectiva distinta; mientras el original profundiza más en la postura de los sindicatos franceses, la traducción espa?ola abunda más en la explicación del porqué de las medidas adoptadas en Francia’ (2005: 100) (‘the function of the original and the translation is the same: to inform, but they do it from a different perspective; while the original deals in more depth with the position of the French trade unions, the Spanish translation centres on explaining the reason for the measures taken in France'). This change of news angle is not only usual in translations of news reports from different organizations, but is also frequent within the same organization as in the case of news agencies, especially in a type of translation involving the combined use of different source texts with the purpose to rework them and summarize them in a single target text.

The example mentioned above would, following an idea of equivalence, not be considered a translation. Yet, it is precisely the change of angle that makes it a successful translation, able to function as news for the Spanish public. In other words, it is effective as news not because it has reached equivalent effect – itself a superfluous objective because in Spain the closure of the French Central Bank does not have the same relevance it has in France – but because it is able to communicate effectively across linguistic, cultural and geographical boundaries, and inform new readers precisely of those aspects on which they need to be informed.

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