Piet Van Poucke

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.