Anneleen Spiessens

Translating news discourse on the Crimean crisis: patterns of reframing on the Russian website InoSMI

ABSTRACT This article draws on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and framing in order to explore how the Western coverage of the 2014 Crimean crisis is represented on the Russian news translation website InoSMI. Based on the analysis of 770 original and 39 translated articles from The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde and Le Figaro, the study exposes various framing mechanisms that allow the Russian website to reconfigure the West’s discourse along a moral, economic, political and military axis, according to a pattern that Van Dijk refers to as the ‘ideological square’. Through selective appropriation, shifts in translations and visual strategies, InoSMI produces a discourse that is more in line with the Kremlin’s official viewpoints than the original data set. In the translation process, Russia emerges as a powerful yet honourable player on the global stage, while the West’s morally ambiguous position in the conflict and the divisions within its ranks are brought to the fore.

Translation as argumentation: ethos and ethical positioning in Hoess's Commandant of Auschwitz

This paper draws on rhetoric and discourse analysis to explore the role and position of the mediator – editor or translator – who voices the perpetrators perspective. The process inevitably raises questions of agency and ethical responsibility, compelling mediators to disclose their own attitude and leave traces of their presence in the text. Discursive strategies allow them to inject their own voice into the text, thus producing a counterdiscourse that can oppose and even sabotage the perpetrators discourse. I propose an analysis of the speakers “ethos” in the mediated autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz who was sentenced to death in 1947. I will assess the importance of editorial and translational intervention as argumentation and positioning, in order to acknowledge editors and translators as ethical agents.

Voicing the Perpetrator’s Perspective

Abstract This paper draws on discourse analysis and narrative theory to uncover the strategies exploited by authors who voice the perpetrators’ perspectives on war and conflict. As an extreme form of literature on both a formal and an ethical level, perpetrators’ testimonies cannot be but a ‘relayed’ and therefore layered story, calling for a particular mise en scène. The paper assesses the importance of mediation as re-narration in Une Saison de machettes, an account written by former war reporter Jean Hatzfeld that presents transcribed interviews with Rwandan génocidaires. An analysis of excerpts from the English and Dutch translations of Hatzfeld’s book reveals the polyphonic nature of the killers’ discourse and subverts the idea of a ‘consonant’ translation as promoted by Hatzfeld himself.

Customer complaints and disagreements in a multilingual business environment. A discursive-pragmatic analysis

Abstract This paper probes into authentic CMC business complaints and disagreements by offering a discourse-pragmatic analysis of complaint negotiation e-mails written by French- and German-language customers. The analysis focuses on an identification and description of complaint and disagreement strategies, and on the presence of internal and external modifiers. Our data, gathered ethnographically at the sales department of a Belgian multinational, shows how the customer’s discourse evolves from more neutral, problem-oriented, routinized formulations in first complaints towards more confrontational, person-oriented, ad hoc formulations in disagreement e-mails as reactions to complaint refusals. This discursive change goes hand in hand with an increase in the use of direct speech act realizations and upgraders. As it appears, in the course of the complaint negotiation, face-threat to the speaker outweighs consideration of the addressee’s face needs. The most notable cross-cultural difference we found between German- and French-speaking customers is a more explicit style in German and a more confrontational style in French, with cross-cultural differences gaining weight at the expense of international communicative norms in less routinized messages. Finally, the results of our study urge us to reassess concepts of directness, and on a societal level, they serve to promote intercultural awareness in business contexts.