Journalistic translation is a subdomain of the field of Translation Studies (van Doorslaer 2007). A comparatively young subfield, it has established its grounding and has attracted increasing academic attention over the past two decades. Several studies during that time period have provided a top-down qualitative analysis and systematic review of the research in the field of journalistic translation (for example Conway 2015a; Schäffner 2018; Davier, Schäffner, et al. 2018; Valdeón 2015; 2020). However, few studies have provided a quantitative and statistical account of the research in the field. This study addresses this gap by providing a bibliometric study of Journalistic Translation Research (JTR) as an alternative interpretation to the two decades of research in journalistic translation. There are three primary aims of this study: (1) to unravel prominent features of bibliometric information; (2) to investigate the most discussed topics and areas of focus; and (3) to examine the prominent methodological approaches adopted in JTR over the past two decades. This article adopts the use of journalistic translation as the name of the subfield rather than news translation because it is not just concerned with the specific genre of print newspapers and news websites but also includes other journalistic genres such as periodicals, TV and radio broadcasting. In addition, it adopts translation research as an umbrella term which encompasses both translation and interpreting studies.

The study covers a span of two decades since it is generally believed that journalistic translation has developed into a subfield within Translation Studies since the mid-2000s (McLaughlin 2015; Valdeón 2015). This paper aims to examine JTR by combining a bottom-up quantitative method with qualitative analysis because, as van Doorslaer (2015: 172) acknowledges, one of the limitations of bibliometric methods is that “the focus on the quantitative data inevitably runs the risk of overshadowing qualitative peculiarities or nuances.” This study comprises a corpus-based bibliometric analysis. First, it gives a quantitative account of the research and then it explains these results with reference to qualitative analysis.

The next section gives a brief overview of bibliometric studies in Translation Studies. Section 3 describes the data and methodology used for this study. The findings of the bibliometric study of JTR in the Translation Studies Bibliography (TSB) are presented after that, with Section 4 analyzing the bibliometric data of JTR from several perspectives. Sections 5 and 6 examine the research topics and methodological approaches in JTR respectively.

The methods of bibliometrics have been applied by researchers to analyze academic publications for several decades. They were first developed in the social sciences, later adopted in the humanities and subsequently used by translation scholars to map “knowledge structuring” (van Doorslaer 2014: 22) in the field of Translation Studies. Despite their common usage, various terms have been used by translation scholars to describe bibliometric methods, the most common of which are bibliometrics, scientometrics and bibliographies. These terms are often used interchangeably without precision. Scientometrics is defined as “the study of information and publications in their social, economic, and political settings” (van Doorslaer and Gambier 2015: 306), while bibliometrics is used to refer to “the study of the production, dissemination, and use of scientific publications and communications, based mainly on textual parameters” (van Doorslaer and Gambier 2015: 306). In this paper, the term bibliometrics will be used to describe both the biographical and textual data of publications.

Bibliometrics have been applied by translation and interpreting scholars to give a comprehensive overview of the diachronic development of the whole discipline (Gile 2015; Zanettin, Saldanha, et al. 2015). Several studies have used bibliometric data to examine translation or interpreting studies in specific countries or regions, such as Grbić and Pöllabauer’s (2008) scientometric study of research on community interpreting in German-speaking countries, Rovira-Esteva and Orero’s (2011) contrastive analysis of research assessment in translation and interpreting in Spain, and Wang’s (2015) bibliometric study of interpreting research in China. Previous studies have also explored those translation studies which adopted a particular approach, for instance, Zhang, Pan, et al.’s (2015) bibliometric survey of journal articles which focused on a discourse analysis approach to Translation Studies. A number of studies have used quantitative data to analyze a subfield of TS, including interpreting studies (Pöchhacker 1995), conference interpreting research (Gile 2000), community interpreting (Grbić and Pöllabauer 2008), non-professional interpreting (Martínez-Gómez 2015), and medical translation and interpreting (Aixelá 2010). These studies show the benefits of bibliometric methods and provide significant insights into the diachronic development of these subfields of TS.

To date, bibliometrics have not been used to analyze JTR, except for one study in Chinese. Zheng (2020) employed CiteSpace,[1] a visualization software package, to conduct a comparative bibliometric analysis of English and Chinese journal articles on journalistic translation. The articles were published between 2000 and 2018 and were taken from the Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index and Science Citation Index databases on the Web of Science[2] as well as from the core journal database of China National Knowledge Infrastructure.[3] However, the study did not take into account journals which are not indexed in these major databases or other publication types which might contain JTR, and publications in languages other than English and Chinese were not included. As van Doorslaer (2015: 170) points out, “T&I [Translation and Interpreting] journals are only very partially represented in the main citation indexes.” Thus, it is better to use one of the main online bibliographies, such as the Translation Studies Bibliography. This study aims to provide a comprehensive account of JTR in various publication types in several languages from the TSB. The next section describes the corpus and methods used in this study.

The Translation Studies Bibliography (Gambier and van Doorslaer 2013) is a comprehensive online database developed by John Benjamins Publishing Company, containing all major publications in translation and interpreting studies. It includes a wide variety of journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, conference proceedings, theses/dissertations, edited volumes and monographs, with annual updates of bibliographical materials. In 2015, it merged with Translation Studies Abstracts,[4] another major bibliography in TS, which was originally developed by St. Jerome.

A search for titles containing “news” in all fields in the TSB generated 429 results from between 2000 and 2019.[5] A query of “news” was searched in all fields because the search deliberately included a comprehensive list of publications with a focus on journalistic translation. A thorough manual check on each entry was conducted afterwards to screen out book reviews and any publications which have nothing to do with translation and journalism or only a tangential relationship to the topic. Each entry provides bibliographical information regarding author/editor, title, year, pages, publication type, language, journal/publisher, keywords and abstract. All these entries are written in English even if the publication is in another language. The abstracts are based on information contributed by a particular author or various other sources, including journal/book abstracts if it is a journal article or book chapter.

A corpus of 396 abstracts on journalistic translation from the TSB was compiled on Sketch Engine,[6] an online corpus software package. The general information from the TSB corpus is presented in Table 1. Each English abstract contains an average of nearly five (4.8) sentences with just over 30 (30.7) words per sentence. The metadata of each abstract, including author/editor, year of publication, language, publication type and keywords, are annotated to each document according to the information provided by the TSB.

The corpus-based bibliometric analysis of the entries contains both quantitative and qualitative methods, as follows: (1) it starts with a quantitative calculation of the metadata of annotated entries in the TSB from the perspectives of year, author/editor, journal/publisher, publication type and language; (2) it then examines the research topics of the JTR by looking at the keywords provided in the entries in the TSB as well as at keywords and high-frequency nouns extracted from the abstracts as a result of a corpus analysis of these abstracts using Sketch Engine; (3) finally, it explores the keywords list, including the term approach in the TSB and the diachronic patterns concerning different approaches employed by researchers to studying journalistic translation.

This study compares the keywords given by the TSB with the keywords, both single words and multi-words, generated in a corpus analysis. The keyword system in the TSB provides a reliable indication of the research topics and areas of focus in the field. As van Doorslaer (2005) notes: “[t]he quantitative analysis of these key words and their thematic fields indicate the priorities in the dissemination of TS [Translation Studies] research.” In corpus linguistics, the term keyword has a slightly different meaning, as it refers to words which “occur statistically more often” than to those in a reference corpus (Baker 2006: 125, emphasis in original). English Web 2015 (enTenTen15),[7] a corpus consisting of 15 billion words of texts from the internet, was chosen as the reference corpus for the corpus analysis. A qualitative analysis of the abstracts was conducted after the quantitative analyses of these annotated entries.

This section examines publications in the field of journalistic translation across various countries/geographical regions in different languages by employing the bibliometrics of the TSB.

This section gives a detailed account of the topics and areas of focus of JTR over the past two decades. It first explores the most frequent keywords from the entries on journalistic translation provided by the TSB, and then analyzes the high-frequency words and keywords of the publications’ abstracts through the use of corpus analysis tools. Finally, it compares the keywords generated by the TSB with those of the corpus analysis to see if there are any similarities and differences.

The use of multiple approaches and methods in JTR reflects recent academic interests in journalistic translations. Table 5 shows the keywords involving “approach” in the TSB corpus. Their frequencies are provided in the right-hand column. Overall, cultural and sociological approaches are the most popular approaches in JTR, and these account for a total of 45 publications (11.36%). Literary and historical approaches are each adopted in eight publications. The linguistic approach is represented in seven works, followed by functionalist, ethnographic, pragmatic and political approaches. Two publications employ each of sociolinguistic, descriptive, cognitive, philosophical and economic approaches. The following subsections give a brief account of several prominent approaches.

This study aims to sketch out the field of JTR over the past two decades. It achieves this through a corpus-based bibliometric study of the entries from the TSB. The bibliometric analyses of publications show that journalistic translation received increasing attention by scholars, although it fluctuated and peaked around 2010. The majority of prolific authors and editors of these publications are based in Europe, although there are a few in the Asia-Pacific region. This result is consistent with what Valdeón (2015) notes; namely, that Europe is still at the forefront of JTR, although an increasing number of researchers from the Asia-Pacific region have contributed to this research area. Most of the edited volumes and monographs in this field are published by prestigious publishers, including Routledge, John Benjamins and Cambridge Scholars Publishing. In terms of journal publications, Meta and Perspectives have published the highest number of journal articles on journalistic translation. Journal articles predominate research outputs in this field. As a lingua franca of international publications, English remains the predominant language of these publications, followed by a number of European languages such as Spanish, French and German, with only a small number of non-European languages. This finding broadly supports other bibliometric studies in Translation Studies (Zanettin, Saldanha, et al. 2015). A possible reason for this might be that the TSB is a bibliography developed and maintained by European scholars and institutions.

The second major finding was that JTR covers a variety of topics and areas of focus. Through a quantitative analysis of keywords in the TSB, the study found that JTR focuses on news from multimedia platforms in the era of convergence (Davier and Conway 2019), including newspapers, television and the internet. Ideological issues of journalistic translation received much scholarly attention, as these are often studied in relation to the critical discourse analysis of political and economic discourses. Cultural issues have also received much attention. Translation strategies have been the focus of a number of linguistic studies. Corpus analysis of both high-frequency nouns and single-word and multi-word keywords complements the research findings, which suggest that process-oriented research exploring the translator’s role is scarce in JTR. Much scholarly attention in the JTR has been devoted to translations of journalistic texts, whereas relatively little attention has been given to journalistic interpreting.

The study gives a brief overview of the main approaches adopted in the field of journalistic translation over the past two decades as seen from the keywords in the TSB. It found that cultural and social approaches are dominant approaches adopted by scholars, followed by a range of other approaches, including literary, historical, linguistic, functionalist and ethnographic ones. This finding suggests that JTR has moved beyond the textual level and has entered into the socio-cultural aspects of journalistic translation. Previous studies in journalistic translation often classify the literature in this subfield into three main categories based on linguistic practices, institutional routines and socio-cultural contexts (Valdeón 2015; Conway 2015a; Schäffner 2018). However, this taxonomy is not always stable, and Conway (2015a) points out that the classification of these three categories of approaches is misleading because they are not always consistent, and because a study may not fall into one single category but rather be a hybrid of several approaches. These results partially corroborate Zheng (2020), who found that research foci of international JTR include discourse, ideology, cultural diversity, news media and new media, whereas Chinese domestic research focuses on translation methods and strategies.

The findings generated from this study point to several future trends in JTR. As many scholars in journalistic translation have pointed out, linguistic analysis alone cannot paint a full picture of how news texts come into being, so they suggest a multidisciplinary study of journalistic translation in addition to the linguistic approach (for example Davier and van Doorslaer 2018; Davier, Schäffner, et al. 2018). A comprehensive approach that combines all these three approaches (the political economic approach, the linguistic approach and the cultural studies or sociological approach, in Conway’s terminologies) is a materialist approach proposed by Conway (2015a). Linguistic analysis of news texts could lead to the identification of translation strategies, which are determined by institutional practices, policies and values. Studies into journalistic translation would be more comprehensive if they combined textual analysis with ethnographic fieldwork aimed at investigating institutional practices and policies (Davier and van Doorslaer 2018; Davier, Schäffner, et al. 2018).

The data of this study is limited to the entries on journalistic translation in the TSB. Van Doorslaer (2015: 172) warns us against “the risk of non-representativeness in any corpus created for bibliometric research.” Although the TSB corpus tries to address the issue of comprehensiveness, it is inevitable that certain language, approaches or research types may be over or underrepresented. As the bibliometric analysis of the JTR shows, journal articles may be overrepresented whereas Ph.D. theses are underrepresented in the TSB. Just as Zanettin, Saldanha, et al. (2015: 163) point out that “TSA [Translation Studies Abstracts] is essentially an Anglophone database,” the JTR in English might be foregrounded in the TSB, with other languages being much less represented. The research in Chinese has almost been left unnoticed under the Anglophone dominance of English publications in the TSB; indeed, there are only two journal articles in Chinese, including two studies (Li 2001; Cheng 2002) exploring the translation of international news from English to Chinese in Hong Kong.

The findings of this study have a number of practical implications for future research. This study mainly focuses on the textual information of bibliometric information. Further research could usefully consider citation analysis to explore the network of literature. The TSB mostly indexes Translation Studies journals, but does not include all the articles on journalistic translation. Although a few other neighbouring disciplines are included, there are few journals from the field of media and communications. For example, communication journals such as Journalism and Journalism Studies are now publishing on journalistic translation. Gile (2020: 3) observes that “bibliometric studies that only explore translation journals would probably miss a substantial part of CIR [Conference Interpreting Research] production.” Although Gile (2020) is referring to conference interpreting research, this applies to other subfields in Translation Studies as well. Future research needs to be conducted in order to explore the field from a wider variety of journals.