The need to deal with linguistic diversity in news production and the simultaneous circulation of news in different languages make translation an important part of news agency work. But news agencies do not tend to employ translators as such. This is because translation is not conceived as separate from other journalistic tasks of writing up and editing, and is mainly assumed by the news editor, who usually works as part of a desk, where news reports are edited and translated and sent to a specific newswire. Both processes of edition and translation imply the tasks of selection, correction, verification, completion, development or reduction that will give texts the final form in which they appear in the newswire.

Translation is thus an important part of journalistic work and is subject to the same requirements of genre and style that govern journalistic production in general. News organizations employ journalists rather than translators because only the former have the specific skills needed for the job: an experience of journalistic work and a precise knowledge of journalistic genres and style. Even if they are not journalists, news translators must work as if they were. We will see in more detail below what the process of news translation entails. At the moment, it will suffice to present it as an example of rewriting in the journalistic field, comparable to literary rewritings such as translations, anthologies, literary histories, biographies and book reviews, all of which, according to André Lefevere, entail similar processes of adaptation and manipulation of the original text (1992: 8).3 Like literary rewritings, journalistic rewritings are the form in which news is made available to readers worldwide, although this fact is either generally hidden or taken for granted.

News translation challenges more traditional conceptions of the translator, whose role is in this context perceived in more active terms. José Manuel Vidal has put it as follows: ‘El traductor de prensa es, quizás por la propia naturaleza del medio para el que traduce, un recreador, un escritor, delimitado por la idea que debe recrear y por el género periodístico en el que tiene que verter su traducción’ (2005: 386) ('The news translator is, maybe because Translation in global news agencies 57of the nature of the medium in which she writes, a re-creator, a writer, limited by the idea she has to re-create and by the journalistic genre in which her translation has to be done').

Multilingual journalists may not have specific training in translation as such, although they are often experts in news translation: able to produce fast and reliable translations on a wide range of subjects that are covered in the journalistic medium. Today, as in the early years, agency journalists are expected to be fluent in foreign languages. Moreover, both in AFP and Reuters one specific test for entry to work as news editor in a desk is the translation of a piece of news. The integration of translation in the production of news maximizes the efficiency of news organizations that have had, since their inception, to deal with linguistic diversity and to communicate information across linguistic borders. However, news organizations have also developed special structures that facilitate the flow of information and minimize the need for translation. The next section examines in more detail how global agencies deal with linguistic diversity and the role of translation at different stages of the production of news.

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