ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between media translation and politics in multilingual contexts. By media translation, we mean translation practices in both traditional media (e.g. television and newspaper) and social media (e.g. Twitter). With an eye to investigating various aspects of this relationship, we adopt a narrow and broad definition of politics. In a narrow sense, politics is defined as actions and practices of political actors, including politicians, formal political institutions and citizens who participate in the political process. With this understanding of politics, we argue that translation practices in the media are essential to the establishment of cross-linguistic communication about political actions and practices. Besides, we consider the production of translated political information in the media a political activity in its own right, as it involves decisions that determine whether and how specific political messages flow from one linguistic community to another. In a broad sense, politics is defined as norms, rules and expectations that govern behaviour in the society. Based on this definition, we describe the relationship between media translation and politics in terms of the factors (e.g. socio-political constraints) that can govern the production of translated political information in the media.
