Are South African print newspaper narratives reframed for Internet news portals or not?

Abstract

This paper deals with the translation of newspaper texts from Afrikaans/English newspapers for Afrikaans/English Internet news portals. In this paper I discuss to what extent newspaper reports, selected for translation and subsequent publication on the Internet, undergo a reframing process and how these reports are edited, rewritten, reshaped and repackaged (transformed) for a new cultural context (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009). This study has a sociological and cultural perspective in that it deals with Baker’s (2006) narrative frame model in detecting which narrative frames can be identified in the translation of these texts from South African newspapers for a more global readership. Baker sees framing as an active strategy that implies agency through which translators consciously participate in the construction of reality within a specific socio-cultural group. The way in which and the reasons why the news teams for the Internet news portals (re)direct or reframe the perspective of reality as constituted within South African print newspapers is the main research topic.