American political culture has virtually precluded public discussion about the fundamental weaknesses of capitalism, forcing media reformers to argue defensively that commercial broadcasting is a special case of market failure. This investigation questions the historical inevitability of commercialized mass media structure by examining how the ideology of media professionalism is deployed in public debate over noncommercial uses of mass media resources. The work of John Dewey and Walter Lippmann frame a theoretical understanding of how professional autonomy works in opposition to community, and thus how professionalization works in opposition to a shared democratic sphere. Relying on the fundamental concepts of discursive formations studied in depth by Michel Foucault, three case studies analyze historic moments (the invention of listener support by Lewis Hill, the rise of news reporting by community television volunteers, and the introduction of media literacy in K-12 public education) that offer evidence of discursive breaks within the constructions of professionalism that support commercialization, and what those breaks suggest about the re-instantiation of the historical inevitability of the commercial regime. The conclusion discusses how conditions have led us to a point of deprofessionalization, a state in which media consumers disarm the notion of professionalism before it can be deployed as a governing relation, and how deproduction of authoritative texts effectively contains the power of professionalized norms. INDEX WORDS: Professionalism, Professionalization, Media reform, Commercialization, Noncommercial media, Dewey-Lippmann debate, Lewis Hill, Community television, Media literacy, Deproduction, Deprofessionalization

La traduction pragmatique n’est pas le domaine réservé des traducteurs travaillant dans les secteurs économiques en dehors de l’édition. De nombreux traducteurs d’édition sont aussi des traducteurs pragmatiques. Dans ce domaine, leur spécialisation ne se confond pas avec le domaine dans lequel ils travaillent. Leur métier est méconnu et il n’existe aucune formation pour préparer les aspirants traducteurs à cette spécialisation. Cette recherche s’efforce de combler cette lacune. Elle commence par décrire les ouvrages pragmatiques afin de montrer que dans ce secteur, la réflexion traductive porte sur le texte dans sa mise en page. L’unité de traduction s’hybride, puisqu’elle est composée de rubriques textuelles aux fonctions communicatives précises et d’éléments visuels. Il s’ensuit que la réflexion traductive demande une approche multisémiotique qui s’appuie sur une connaissance approfondie du livre pris comme un espace signifiant dont le texte n’est qu’une composante parmi d’autres. La connaissance du livre est au cœur de la spécialisation des traducteurs pragmatiques actifs dans l’édition. Le milieu de l’édition attend des auteurs et traducteurs un travail de rédacteurs. Les tapuscrits fournis sont relus et corrigés, voire partiellement réécrits pour les améliorer, par les correcteurs. Il n’y a plus un auteur mais une fonction auteur qui réunit les différents intervenants de la chaîne du livre. L’apprentissage du métier doit donc comporter une part de socialisation seconde, intégrée aux exercices de traduction proposés, pour préparer les aspirants traducteurs à s’insérer dans cette équipe. Tout en se perfectionnant en traduction, les jeunes traducteurs doivent se muer en collaborateurs fiables capables de prendre part au processus de fabrication du livre en agissant en tant que médiateur culturel. Leur action s’exprime principalement par l‘écriture de la traduction mais aussi par leurs commentaires sur la fabrication du livre. / Pragmatic translation is thought as the area of specialized translators working for clients outside of the publishing industry, which is deemed to contract literary translators. This is true to some extend. However a large sector of the publishing industry is not concerned with literature but with pragmatic books dealing with all sorts of topics. Many pragmatic translators working for the publishing industry are in fact specialized in translating pragmatic books, not texts. They have to understand the way pragmatic books, made of visual and linguistic messages, convey information to their readers to translate them. This aspect of translation is little known and, outside the study of translation for advertising, research investigating the interaction of texts and iconography is scarce. There is even less on translator training. This thesis endeavours to contribute the observations of a professional translator turned translator trainer. It begins by describing the layout of pragmatic books and showing how the translator must take in the text and the iconography to make sense of the message. The double page is a visual unit splitting the information between text and images. As a result, a translation unit is a mix of texts and images. It follows that translators have to approach the translation of books as a multisemiotic activity. Therefore, when translating pragmatic books, translators have to consider them as signifying space in which textual units are no longer the only source of information. The core of the specialisation of pragmatic translators working in the publishing industry is a profound understanding of how books communicate meaning. Publishers expect both authors and translators to be able to write following style specifications for a given book series. Tapuscrits are proofread and sometimes partially rewritten to be put in agreement with the social communicative norms. At the end of the process leading to the publication of a book, the published text is a collective product and no longer the text originally provided by its “author”. To translate in this context, trainees must learn how to work in a team, albeit working from home. Translation training, at this point, aims at turning students into independent professional able to rewrite and adapt texts, taking into account the visual around, to accommodate readers’ expectations as defined by publishers. As they strive to improve their translation techniques, soon to be translators also need to learn to become cultural mediator and to criticize the books they are translating so as to improve them if need be. Invisible to readers, their contribution to the making of a book, appears in the writing of the translation and in comments on the book itself; and it is very visible to publishers they work for.