ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the issue of translation non-equivalence in news media contexts, adopting a general pragmatic approach in combination with a critical perspective. It argues that the centrality of translation work in the modern mediascape requires us to pay a more systematic attention to the ideological implications of (mis)translation in news production, news reception and news dissemination because such practice – be it incidental or intentional – often has tangible consequences in real life. While mistranslation, arising from various shifts that render the source and target texts partially or fully non-equivalent, may pass unnoticed in most news media texts, it occasionally generates subsequent communicative acts, new media texts and whole metalinguistic discourses that develop around such misrepresentations. One of the roles of pragmatics is to probe the way meanings are constructed, construed, as well as misconstrued, within the increasingly complex participation frameworks existing around translation-based news and its re-translations in other communicative contexts, thus helping us to understand the socio-political effects of (mis)translation on both local and global levels.
