Abstract

In recent decades, international news coverage has been steadily increasing as a result of globalization. However, it was not until the launch of the “Translation in Global News” initiative at the University of Warwick in the mid-2000s that news translation started attracting the attention it deserved. Researchers worldwide participated in this multi-year project, but no case study was carried out regarding news translation practices in the Japanese media. This paper examines how US President Obama’s speeches during and after the 2012 Presidential campaign have been translated as his direct quotes in Japan by comparing five major newspapers. The purpose of this research is: 1) to make visible the existence and the role of journalist-translators in Japanese newsrooms; 2) to illustrate that translations by five different newspapers are significantly different from one another; and 3) to analyze those differences through the use of translation strategies, namely omission.