Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the often-conflicting relationship between newsworthiness and translatability by analyzing how Japanese newspaper articles quoted President Trump and President Obama through comparison of their original speeches and the news texts published in their first 100 days in office.

Paper long abstract:

According to journalist-turned-sociolinguist Allan Bell, "News is what people say more than what people do," and much of what journalists report is "talk not action" (Bell 1991: 53). This statement holds true in the case of Japanese newspapers, which are filled with quotations, including utterances that have been translated into Japanese.

While news media in some countries prefer to use indirect speech, Japanese media prefer direct quotation, in which utterances are generally reproduced as faithfully as possible (Matsushita 2019). However, this standard proves flexible when translation is involved, leading to unique findings such as textual manipulations (e.g. omissions, additions, substitutions, etc.) at levels rarely seen in monolingual quoting (ibid.).

The emergence of Donald Trump as an exceptionally newsworthy U.S. president has posed an even larger challenge to news translators in Japan because of his unexpected and hard-to-translate remarks. Japanese newspapers often write stories about President Trump's off-the-cuff remarks and seemingly random tweets but nearly as often fail to achieve linguistic and cultural equivalence because his utterances are difficult if not impossible to translate into any other language (Lichfield 2016), let alone one as linguistically distant as Japanese (Osaki 2017).

This paper illustrates how untranslatability can prevent a newsworthy utterance from being directly quoted (e.g. changed to indirect quotes or reproduced less faithfully) by comparing how Japanese journalists have quoted President Trump and his predecessor, President Obama. Through comparison of original speeches (source texts) and 808 articles published in Japanese newspapers (target texts), it shows how institutional conventions of Japanese newspaper companies regarding direct quotations are strategically ignored when quoting President Trump, leading to marked differences in the portrayal of the two presidents.

References

Bell, Allan. 1991. The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lichfield, Gideon. 2016. "Inside the nearly impossible quest to translate 'Make America Great Again' into Spanish." QUARTZ, November 26, 2016.

Matsushita, Kayo. 2019. When News Travels East: Translation Practices by Japanese Newspapers. Leuven University Press.

Osaki, Tomohiro. 2017. "Japan's interpreters struggle to make sense of 'Trumpese.'" The Japan Times, February 17, 2017.