Chapter Sixteen - Translation and the Press

Summary

This chapter examines the translation of news both into and out of English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We consider the scope and significance of translation, what we know about the translators, and the kinds of strategies employed as well as their rationale. In his study of early modern translation, Burke succinctly refers to such investigation as ‘Who translates? With what intentions? What? For whom? In what manner? With what consequences?’ (2007: 11).

Throughout the period newspapers relied heavily on translation for their coverage of international news. Either the editors or printers translated directly from the source language, or they copied news items from other newspapers, which had themselves either translated the news story or relied in turn on an earlier translation of the news bulletin. The translation and copying of brief news items or entire paragraphs of previously published foreign news was one of the characteristics of the age and considered totally normal. John Adams remarked, when based in Paris in 1783, that ‘no sooner does a paragraph appear in a French, Dutch or English paper, but it is immediately seized on and reprinted in all the others’ (Slauter 2012: 254).

Although normal, the practice sometimes proved irksome. For example, in 1719 the editor of the Quintessence des lettres historiques, critiques, politiques, morales et galantes complained that all one had to do in order to launch a new periodical was to ‘piller adroitement ses confrères gazetiers, et, à la faveur d’une traduction, revendre en fran-çais ce que d’autres ont déjà débité en flamand’ (Trenard 1969: 149). It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that the more successful newspapers started to base their international news on reports sent back by their own correspondents. In 1791 James Perry, the editor of the Morning Chronicle, travelled to France to send on-the-spot reports back to his own newspaper, while in 1807 Henry Crabbe Robinson went to Altona in Holstein as The Times's correspondent (Barker 2000: 106).

The translation of foreign-printed news was so commonplace that newspapers hardly ever acknowledged that their news was translated.