Author(s)

QiLin Li

Affiliation(s)

The University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Victoria, Australia.

Corresponding Author

QiLin Li

ABSTRACT

This research examines how news translation norms operate in contemporary newsroom practice and how conflicts between norms arise and are handled. It proposes a three-layer framework for translation inside news production that links preliminary norms, operational norms, and the observable forms of conflict between them. In doing so, it extends Gideon Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies by focusing on the changing relation between norm operation and conflict emergence. A mixed-methods design combines corpus analysis with qualitative case studies. The corpus data come from multilingual comparable corpora (2019 to 2024) drawn from Reuters’ translation system, about 50,000 words in English, Spanish, French, and Chinese. The case studies track financial crisis reporting in Reuters, the BBC, and CNN during major economic episodes, including 2020 market volatility and 2023 banking sector concerns. Findings show that norms act as dynamic regulatory systems rather than fixed rules. They work through ongoing tension between institutional standardization and cultural adaptation. Conflict resolution follows a U-shaped efficiency pattern, where early workflow disruption is followed by improved performance as cultural elements are integrated and norms become more flexible. Normative competition also supports professional innovation instead of lowering translation quality. This challenges the adequacy versus acceptability divide. The study links descriptive norm theory to globalized media work and argues that successful news translation depends on newsroom frameworks that can negotiate competing normative pressures in real time.

KEYWORDS

Translation norms; News translation; Cross-cultural communication; Normative competition; Operational mechanisms

CITE THIS PAPER

QiLin Li. The operation and conflict of translation norms in news translation. Journal of Trends in Arts and Humanities. 2026, 3(1): 1-6. DOI: https://doi.org/10.61784/jtah3051.

REFERENCES

[1] Valdeón R A. Journalistic translation research twenty-five years on: methods, topics and prospects. Perspectives, 2025: 1-19.

[2] Zanettin F. News media translation. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

[3] Kalantari E. Journalistic translation: A gate at which journalism studies and translation studies meet. Journalism, 2022, 23(7): 1411-1429.

[4] Su L, Li J, Tu Y, et al. The political dialectics of transediting: the case of Reference News. The Translator, 2024, 30(4): 441-454.

[5] Kamyanets A. Constructing competing discourses on the Russo-Ukrainian war: journalistic translation in wartime. Cognition, Communication, Discourse, 2024, 29: 25-41.

[6] Kotze H, Janssen B, Koolen C, et al. Norms, affect and evaluation in the reception of literary translations in multilingual online reading communities: Deriving cognitive-evaluative templates from big data. Translation, Cognition & Behavior, 2021, 4(2): 147-186.

[7] Kotze H. Concepts of translators and translation in online social media: construal and contestation. Translation Studies, 2025, 18(1): 19-43.

[8] Hong J. Translation of attribution and news credibility. Journalism, 2021, 22(3): 787-803.

[9] Amanullah A. News Translation as Media Work in Agency Journalism? Evidence from United News of India Urdu. Journalism Studies, 2024, 25(13): 1676-1697.

[10] Ping Y. Setting the cultural agenda for domestic readers: A corpus analysis of news translation in Culture Weekly. Frontiers in Communication, 2022, 7: 1039505.