TRANSLATION WATCH QUARTERLY Volume 2, Issue 1, March 2006 52 of 94 Translating the News Reframing Constructed Realities Ali Darwish Central Queensland University ABSTRACT With cable and satellite television networks spreading rapidly and competitively across the globe, news and current affairs television is increasingly becoming a primary source of information for viewers worldwide for both domestic and international stories. While critically relying on translations of news from international providers, these networks are contributing to the reframing of news events and creating information and cultural misfits, often unintended by the original sources and sometimes unwelcome by the intended viewers. This paper examines the impact of translation on news making and argues that by submitting news to translation it undergoes a reframing process entailing a reconstruction of a constructed reality already subjected to professional, institutional and contextual influences. INTRODUCTION “The impact of loss in translation is even greater in languages which are not only distant, but also characterized by a marked and radical differentiation in inequality…” —Rubel and Rosman, (2003:39) Translation has recently received some attention in the news with controversies over the translation of the Bin Laden tapes by CNN, Aljazeera and other news outfits, highlighting an inconspicuous problem of translation-mediated communication and the critical importance of accuracy and precision of translated messages, especially in times of crisis and global instability. The great German genius Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) once asserted that the translator must act “as mediator in this commerce of the mind, making it his business to further this intellectual exchange. For whatever one might say about the inadequacy of translation, nevertheless it is and will remain one of the most important and worthy occupations in the general intertraffic between peoples.” 1 More so in today’s globalization and global television news media, translation- mediated knowledge transfer is becoming increasingly important in “the complex chains of global interdependencies” 2 ; “being able to transmit vast amounts of information rapidly from continent to continent, we have