Légitimité ou illégitimité de la traduction dans les agences de presse ?

From what both groups claim, translators and press agency journalists do not seem to be engaged in the same activity, although they both practise interlingual transfer. The working conditions and priorities of agency journalists were analysed by means of interviews and field observations in order to determine the socio-cultural parameters of their “translating” activity: accuracy of information over faithfulness to the original, time pressure, adaptation to the target readership and story readability. According to the kind of source text used (signed note or direct quotation), agency journalists transfer text more or less freely from the source to the target language. Classical translation studies theories are not equipped to ascertain whether or not these different kinds of interlingual transfers can be considered as “translations”. Therefore it was necessary to resort to Relevance Theory, which emphasises adequacy of a text to its target readership, relying on the ratio of contextual effects to processing effort. Finally the classification drawn from Relevance Theory (“interpretive use” vs. “descriptive use”) was further developed and modified to give a better definition of different types of journalistic translation based on the practical experience of agency journalists.