Translation and journalism interfaced: considering the 9/11 cultural representation

Abstract

This paper presents considerations about lexical choices used as meaning construction strategies in journalistic texts. Such choices are seen as cultural markers or filters used by the journalist to represent a fact to the reader who shares the target culture with him, but who does not know about the socio-cultural context where the fact takes place. Thus, the journalist is seen as a translator of facts, while the concept of translation shifts from the source text to news fact itself (ZIPSER, 2002). Based on the German functionalism (NORD, 1991) and on journalism as a socio-cultural map (ESSER, 1998), this paper demonstrates the interface translation-journalism through these concepts and also through some news reports about the “September 11th”, as a parallel corpus, published in Veja and TIME magazines.