This article examines the tendencies of social media influence on the translation of social –political news, by taking into account linguocultural aspect of translation. Internet community forms new words, abbreviations, create various social campaigns, which changes the spoken and written language, and becomes the part of our daily life conversation.
Keywords: social media, social-political news, translation, linguoculturology.
Era of digitalization and informatization brings new tendencies of activity to our society. Day by day we observe the increasing usage of social networking everywhere, in every aspect of life: communication, business, entertainment, as well as social and political news which start to appear increasingly. Nowadays, translation studies face with new challenges concerning emergency of social media. We observe the presence of neologisms, “hashtags”, viral news, abbreviations which reflect up to date tendencies in our society. Politicians, public activists, internet users, trolls, followers, fans have play their own role in social media. Activities, posts, “tweets”, comments lead to formation of new words. These words appear because of the cultural changes, various information approaches, and political events as well.
Aim of this study is to analyze the influence of social media on the translation of social-political news from linguocultural point of view.
Tasks are to describe the most popular social media platforms, to give the examples and characterize popular words and tendencies of social media, to explain how to find translational approaches in order to translate these words properly from English language into Russian language.
According to Shannon Dosemagen- social media is helping us to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges, from human rights violations to climate change. “Social media has become an important tool for providing a space and means for the public to participate in influencing or disallowing environmental decisions historically made by governments and corporations that affect us all. It has created a way for people to connect local environmental challenges and solutions to larger-scale narratives that will affect us as a global community,” says Shannon Dosemagen. [1]
Politicians and voters use such social media like Facebook and Twitter in order to post photographs, personal information and send public messages to their friends, colleagues, clients in cyber space. The advantage of this is that social media is that it removes the wall between professional and consumer, shows another part of life, makes tighten connection between audience.
According to the World Economic Forum [2]- top 3 popular social networks in the world are:
– Facebook. It is the leading social network in 119 out of 149 countries, people mostly share posts, viral news, videos, arranging campaigns, a bright example is Arab Spring, news about Rohingya refugees appered firstly in Facebook.
– Instagram is the second preference in 37 countries, it has 560 million monthly active users. Instagram is popular for insta stories (15 second lasting videos), one minute lasting videos, and posts as well. Social and political events and news in most cases possible to find by using hashtags.
– Twitter is the third in the world but the second in the US and Europe. Twitter is popular among voters, majority of political leaders actively use Twitter as a political tool and means of communication with the audience. Due to the 140 character messages, language on twitter is very precise and unique words are used to ensure that brevity is achieved through.
Social media news and posts have a viral character, when the information spreads as fast as a virus; it is the evidence of the way the culture of digital community has been changing day by day. Furthermore videos or pictures are shared all over the internet via Facebook, Twitter or even searched on Google are known to go viral. Various campaigns: #metoo, #prolife, #hometovote [5] intended to activate social consciousness, and make act against violations of rights. False news (also known as fake) spread across social media very fast, that is why it is very important to trust approved news only.
There are general tendencies of social media influence on the social-political news and methods of translations, suggested to achieve an adequate level of translation of social-political news:
Social media tendency of words internalization is very popular nowadays. Internet users are influenced by the digital culture, it is obvious in fact that we have so many new words which we use and don’t even pay attention, like: hype(promote or publicize (a product or idea) intensively, often exaggerating its benefits); hater(a person that simply cannot be happy for another person's success. So rather than be happy they make a point of exposing a flaw in that person) [3], troll(one who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument) [3], hashtag (overused tags to show what does person do), swipe(button which turns up and goes to the link) [3], direct(private message in social media) [3], emoticon, human facial expression and convey an emotion. Use in internet forums and instant-messaging.) [3], retweet (repost of someones tweet). These words can be translated into Russian by means of transliteration: хайп, хэйтер, тролль, хэштег, свайп, директ, эмотикон, эмоджи. But for example words: hater (ненавистник, недоброжелатель) can be translated literally but it is not commonly used instead of хэйтер, or swipe-смахнуть, but usually internet users say- свайпнуть. It is important to mention that all these words are international. From linguocultural aspect of translation we can observe that, these words became the parts of our daily life conversation tradition, not only online, but offline as well.
Games of words tendency. For example: Police: Areblack knife deaths being ignored? There were thousands of posts on Facebook about the African people, murdered by knifes in London. Translation method here is concretization- «Черные жизни важны?»; #ENOUGH National Walkout Day-Национальный день забастовки #ENOUGH [4]. The word “ENOUGH” remained untranslated, because this is the name of the campaign. Blacktivist-активисты за права черных людей, frenemy- друзья-враги. Descriptive translation is a better option to explain the meaning of this word. #Standup4humanrights-защита прав человека, #HeforShe- он голосует за нее, #Unitedbyhalf- объединены наполовину, #Girlscount- девочки важны- in these cases is better to use generalization, but the week point of this method of translation is that it does not describe emotional color of the words, though achieves equivalency.
Tendency of precise and hidden information. Many news-portals like: BBC, CNN, Euro-News, Reuters upload videos of 1 minute duration (known as stem video), and provide concise information by adding slides and subtitles to share news, they do it mainly in social networks to attract internet users attention, and make them “repost” the information. It also impacts on the translation, because it has new approach of information delivery, by adding short and bright sentences, sayings like: step free route to work [4]. This sentence can be translated like: свободный путь на работу, but the key words are step free (without steps), so the correct translation is путь на работу через пандусы. The translational decision here is to find key words and make transformation in order to achieve truthful and correct translation. That’s is why translator must be awared with the whole information of the text, and hidden information inside of the sentence. Geriatric starlet — the approach of translation is to use antonymous translation вечно молодая барби. The text was about the eldest model in the world with a face of Barby doll. Instagram users write #armmewith- the aim of their posts about ARM is to attract authorities attention to the vulnerable spheres of life: shootings, murdering, racism, they urge to arm them with knowledge kindness, support a hidden message. Game Changers- means activists who change the situation by inspiring, acquiring people.
Mass quoting tendency. News portals mostly quote blogs, posts of famous policymakers, like: Donald Trump 49.4 million followers, Barack Obama47.3 million followers, HH Sheikh Mohammed 2.9 million followers, Dmitry Medvedev 2.4 million followers and so on. Their “tweets” remain the source of much social-political news.
Donald Trump is the most popular politician on Twitter, because of expressive speech and aggressive claims, here is how Russian media translates his “tweets” [6]:
“FAKE NEWS A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” [6] «Фейковые новости — тотальная политическая охота на ведьм!"
“North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” [6] «Только что Ким Чен Ын заявил, что ядерная кнопка всегда на его столе. Сообщите ему там, в его нищей и голодной стране, что моя ядерная кнопка побольше и помощнее, чем его, и к тому же работает!" — «Твиттер» Дональда Трампа.
Conclusion. The emergence of social networks positively affects on socio-political situation throughout the world. People can get together online, create different campaigns, share stories, draw the attention of the authorities to various problems in society and politics. News portals follow the events described in social networks, cite politicians, conduct activities in the social networks by themselves. With the emergence of social networks, new words have been appeared in the society, which are used by everyone In most cases these words do not find an adequate translation in the other languages, despite English. These words have become part of our culture, everyday communication. The active use of social networks, and their influence on social and political news, make translators look for new ways of translating. Translators should draw their attention to the text, as well as to the expression, events, traditions in order to achieve an adequate translation
References:
- Shannon Dosemagen. Institution for civic techno-science, 126 pages.
- https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/03/most-popular-social-networks-mapped/. URL. [date of visit: 22.03.2018].
- https://www.urbandictionary.com/define. URL. [date of visit 22.03.2018].
- http://www.bbc.com/news. URL. [date of visit 22.03.2018].
- https://www.facebook.com/. URL. [date of visit 22.03.2018.]
- https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump. URL. [date of visit 22.03.2018].
