The Role of Translation in Women Athletes’ Narratives in Sport News

Abstract

This contribution will explore narratives and news translation via the lens of women’s sport. Women’s performance has advanced greatly since the 1900s, but media coverage of women athletes has not kept pace. Media framing of women in sport can be culturally explained in terms of narratives which are inevitably shaped around the predominant voices. Journalism heavily relies on narratives. As news writing draws extensively on foreign sources, narratives are built also through translation, and (foreign) narratives are reconstituted and renegotiated. The goal of this contribution is to study the way translation contributes to “the ideological or aesthetic thrust of a narrative” (Harding 2012, 301) in newspaper articles. We will analyse a corpus of English articles and their Italian counterpart. The articles included in our corpus, drawn from the sports section of generalist newspapers, will focus on internationally debated episodes of female professional tennis: a) the gender gap in prices (2016); b) Justin Gimelstob’s sexist remarks on Anna Kournikova and other female players (2008); c) Naomi Osaka’s withdrawal from Roland Garros in 2021. This overview of articles aims at answering the following questions: 1) What are the narratives which characterize the media coverage of female tennis athletes in translated articles in Italy and abroad? Is there a noticeable difference between the two and over time? 2) What is the role of translation in constructing such narratives? Can the shifts in the translated quotations be seen as acts to adjust the narrative? The contrastive analysis will employ Critical Discourse Analysis, which looks at language in a more holistic way and from a macro-analytic approach while showing that gender is not a given, but it is culturally constructed. The results will be interpreted drawing from Narrative Theory applied to Journalism Studies and Translation Studies.

Keywords: critical discourse analysis, news translation, women in sport, journalism studies, narratives in translation.