Isabel Corona opens the sessions of the Linguistic Corner with a workshop on translation and Gibraltar

13th December 2018

In the first session of the Linguistic Corner, we carried out an analysis of the main techniques used to translate news from Spanish into English and the effect that several processes, specific of journalistic texts, are put to use in the translation of controversial issues, in our case, news about Gibraltar published by the Spanish newspaper El País and translated into English for its edition in English.

We could identify processes such as gatekeeping, localisation and tribalisation. Students attending this session could go in depth into the problems translators face when translating socio-historical and cultural elements of the texts, as well as politically loaded words (such as the use of ‘colony’ to describe the status of Gibraltar), and could find out different practices and real cases of these processes, which led us to reflect upon the ethics of translation and the different existing models for making difficult choices.

All in all, we came up with a lot of food for thought and exchanged interesting perspectives about the conundrums for the 21st-century translator, not only in the journalistic field but also overall.