Translating in the pandemic: On activist translation and the (counter-)hegemonic media

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic suddenly and globally transformed our reality, including our interaction with the environment and with other people, among other aspects. Translation has been playing a key role in transmitting information about the pandemic throughout the world, especially during periods of social confinement. Given the large volume of news, as well as the number of media and formats through which it is spread, we asked ourselves a fundamental question: What (counter-)hegemonic political stances do the different media outlets adopt in moments of unusually high vulnerability and social dependency? In order to answer this question, we have conducted a comparative analysis of the translated versions of articles published by two hegemonic Argentinian media conglomerates and two decentralized Latin American media outlets (the first pair bearing an antagonistic relation to the second one) during the first strict quarantine in Argentina (from March 20th, 2020 to May 10th, 2020). Results suggest that translation as a manifestly sociopolitical act allows the expansion of new ”“or marginalized”“ media, which may make the ideal of democratizing information more possible, as well as point out the importance of translators’ agency for the collective ”“and, initially, linguistic”“ construction of a different world.