Generalizations are often made when translating agency reports

Lucile Davier from the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) looked at more than 1,100 agency reports written in French by the news agency SDA and Agence France-Presse (AFP) and examined how they were translated into German or English. The researcher found that most journalists tried to avoid literal translations. Instead, they preferred to rewrite the reports with a view to the foreign-language reading public and its cultural environment. UNIGE writes that this has an irreversible effect on the perception of the information read. As an example, it cites an AFP agency report in French that was aimed at an international, francophone audience. In it, the SVP was portrayed as a party of the extreme right, whereas such a description would never be used by journalists in French-speaking Switzerland, the researcher emphasized. As an international agency, AFP tends to generalize information as much as possible in order to be understood by readers who are not familiar with the political situation in Switzerland. Nuances are often lost in this process of generalization.

Cultural bubble

Davier also found that journalists usually quoted personalities from neighboring countries for political viewpoints - generally French for the French-speaking Swiss and German for the German-speaking Swiss. According to the study, this approach in turn entails the risk that views and perspectives on other points of view remain limited. "We remain constantly enclosed in the cultural bubble of our language, even though the translation of suggestions from a person from another language community could open up new perspectives for us," the researcher is quoted as saying. In her eyes, translation should not be seen as a task that is only about words, but rather about cultural understanding. (SDA)