Tracing back the process of (re)translation: when, in successive rewritings, change of meaning occurs

This paper aims to analyze how a text can be submitted to several processes of translation before reaching its ultimate receivers. It is the case of news articles concerning international affairs, such as the papal visits to the United Nations General Assembly. Such events are usually transmitted through news agencies’ reports, particularly when target-contexts are geographically distant from the place where the event occurred. Alternatively, when the institutions concerned produce translations by their own services, as it happens in the UN, official translated versions are also made available for further consultation. This means that the media might use as source-text an already translated version either in their mother tongue or in a “common” international language (e.g. English). Their task is, then, to turn the “neutral”, precise discourse of such versions into a more “proper”, culturally and/or editorially-based tone. However, such formerly translated versions do not necessarily correspond to the contents as presented in the origin. In fact, taking the Catholic pontiff’s speeches delivered in the UN as an example, a thorough analysis of the excerpts and the transcripts published by the media might point out differences when comparing them to the official (source) versions. In the case of this study, tracing back the whole translation process - consulting the papal speeches (both in written and oral formats), the translated versions the media indicated as sources and the media’s published version -, it is noticeable how the official text was modified by the several (re)translators. In Translation Studies, this corresponds to the Manipulation School's claim that every translation is a rewriting, ideologically pursued in a target-oriented perspective. It is this broader understanding of translation that I will be assuming in this project. The focus will be placed on Pope Francis’ speech (the source text) and on the Portuguese prestigious newspaper Diário de Notícias (the target text). The endeavor will be, on the one hand, to clarify the biography of the translational process held in the journalistic field, which will hopefully lead to an understanding of when changes in meaning probably occurred; and, on the other, to identify possible reasons for the specific rewritings of each of these speeches, as well as probable effects of the translated versions among receivers.