News agencies can be viewed as vast translation agencies, structurally designed to achieve fast and reliable translations of large amounts of information. It will maintain that translation is of the utmost importance in the news agencies and that it is inseparable from other journalistic practices that intervene in the production of news. Rejecting the naive view that translations are often improvised by people who do not have the necessary training.

Since news agencies inception, in the provision of international news, initially to domestic markets and later, through alliances with other news organizations worldwide, on a global scale. This implied dealing with a diversity of languages and with translation from the very start. It is not a coincidence that these organizations were created by cosmopolitan, multilingual businessmen: Charles Havas had lived and conducted business in Lisbon, while Paul Julius Reuter

was a German who obtained his initial experience of news agency journalism in France before settling in Britain. In fact, as we have seen, before it was transformed into the first news agency in 1835, Agence Havas was a translation agency known as Bureau Havas (1832–35), which provided the French media and business community with translations from the international press. Bureau Havas centralized news translations leaving many freelancers out of work and is the first expression of the growing need for international news from around the world. In the first decades after their inception, news agencies already offered news services in different languages directed at the main Western news markets, and developed global networks which efficiently dealt with linguistic diversity. Agency journalists who pioneered in the expansion of their worldwide networks, managing offices innew regions and serving as agents in the furthest corners of the world, were, very much like the founders themselves, also characterized by their cosmopolitan formation and multilingual skills.

The organization and features of news agencies today with regard to language and translation are not substantially different from what they were in the second half of the nineteenth century. Global news agencies traditionally produce newswires in the major European languages (Reuters and AFP in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German – AP does not offer a Portuguese service but produces a Dutch wire), which are the languages of their main news markets. To these only Arabic is a recent addition (launched by Reuters in 1954 and by AFP in 1969). Therefore, news translation into one of these major languages is undertaken by the news agencies themselves. In the case of other languages, it is the subscribing news organizations which assume the task of translating the information provided by the news agencies.