The translation of tweets in Spanish digital newspapers.

Abstract

Twitter has become an essential tool in newsrooms worldwide. Tweets included in news texts function as quotations and though this discursive practice is relatively recent it continues to grow in digital media. Many of these tweets are written in languages different from that of the receiving media company. This article analyzes how foreign tweets are presented to audiences and how they are translated when inserted in news texts. For this, we have examined the articles from the first five months of 2018 in the Universo Trump [Trump Universe] blog published by the Spanish digital newspaper El País. This blog publishes news about the president of the United States, the people he surrounds himself with as well as his government and it was selected because all the tweets cited in the articles are originally in English. This article presents the translation strategies used by the journalist-translators and we argue that the translation of tweets as quotes in news reports, especially when accompanied by a screenshot of the original tweet, makes the use of translation more obvious and more visible in the transmission of information.