Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation investigates how science news travels from academic research to Flemish news outlets, focusing on the role of translation in its broadest sense—across languages as well as within a single language and non-linguistic transfers—as a core process in science journalism. Drawing on translation studies, science communication, and journalism studies, it conceptualizes translation as the transformation of source material (academic papers or press releases, among others) into news products tailored to specific outlets, platforms, and audiences. The research addresses two main questions: (1) How do Flemish reporters select and use science news sources?; and (2) How can translation be conceptualized in the study of science news? These questions are answered based on four studies that explore: (a) sourcing and writing practices in COVID-19 vaccine news; (b) headline transformations in COVID-19 science news from press release to news article and social media post; (c) science news sourcing and writing practices in the Dutch-language department of Belgium's national multilingual news agency Belga; and (d) intralingual translation in Dutch-language science news. Findings show that the use of indirect sources—press releases, but also news agency dispatches, and other news articles, often based on those press releases—is pervasive. At the same time, these sources are often used without attribution, hindering research into sourcing practices as well as journalistic transparency. Source selection is generally shaped by pragmatic constraints such as time pressure, journalist expertise, or foreign language proficiency. The study contributes new conceptual and methodological tools to the scholarly debate on how science news travels, challenging the focus on interlingual translation that has long dominated journalistic translation research and calling special attention to institutional, sociocultural, and media-specific factors.
Source: Lirias (KU Leuven)
Author: Nelissen, Elisa
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Vlaamse regering
OpenAlex ID: W7112958160
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