Le multilinguisme est omniprésent dans les agences de presse et pourtant, les opérations de traduction(ou de transfert interlinguistique et interculturel, TII) sont rendues textuellement invisibles. Cette thèse de doctorat vise donc trois objectifs principaux. Premièrement, il s'agit de comprendre le processus de production multilingue d'information par les agences de presse, et notamment par l'Agence France-Presse et l'Agence télégraphique suisse. Cette étape est abordée par le biais de méthodes ethnographiques(observation directe du travail des journalistes et entretiens semi-dirigés). Il en ressort que les agenciers entretiennent une conception littéraliste de la traduction qui a pour conséquence des stratégies de désélection et de redite. Deuxièmement, cette thèse combine cette enquête ethnographique avec une analyse de corpus pour découvrir quelles formes de TII sont pratiquées dans les agences précitées.D'après les observations faites, il est nécessaire d'élargir la définition de la traduction afin de pouvoir englober les opérations de transfert ayant lieu au niveau du segment et des realia. Troisièmement, une analyse du corpus aux niveaux macro- et microtextuels vise à cerner les différents problèmes publics constitués en fonction des lectorats projetés. Du fait de la pratique de la redite, notamment, plus le problème public est culturellement éloigné, plus il a tendance à être inscrit dans un champ problématique supposé partagé par le public visé. Les conceptions de la traduction et les pratiques du TII méritent donc d'être prises en considération dans les études portant sur la constitution de problèmes publics transnationaux. / Despite the fact that multilingualism is ubiquitous in news agencies, the operations of translation (or ofinterlingual and intercultural transfer, IIT) are made textually invisible to the final audience. This thesispursues three main objectives. Firstly, it aims at understanding how multilingual information is producedin two news agencies: a global agency, Agence France-Presse, and a national agency, Agence télégraphiquesuisse. This goal is met through the application of ethnographic methods (direct observation of the workof journalists and semi-structured interviews), which show that journalists have a literal conception oftranslation. This conception in turn results in strategies of deselection and rewriting. Secondly, this thesiscombines the ethnographic approach with a corpus analysis in order to discover which types of IIT arepractised in the above-mentioned press agencies. The resulting observations show the need to broadenthe definition of translation so as to include transfer of textual segments and realia. Thirdly, a macro- andmicro-textual corpus analysis explores the different public problems constituted according to theprojected readerships. The practice of rewriting has one particular consequence on the shaping of a publicproblem: the greater the cultural gap between the target readership and the problem, the greater thelikelihood of the problem being presented in a frame of reference that is familiar to the readership. It canthus be said that professional conceptions of translation and practices of IIT deserve more considerationin further studies about the constitution of transnational public problems.

This interdisciplinary project investigates the extents and limits of alternative news translation in the era of globalization and virtualization and is guided by the insights drawn from actor-network theory, material semiotics, ethnomethodology, anthropology, news sociology, and the philosophy of translation. It visually represents the semiotic, sociological and material components of news translation as well as describes the patterned and concerted actions of human and non-human actors that go into making news stories in the context of IPS, a global news agency. A contribution is made to both theoretical knowledge and the development of the conceptual research method, which is given scarce attention in translation studies as compared to prevailing empirical research. A meta-semiotic concept of sociological translation that I formulate helps bridge the gap between tackling ‘translation’ in terms ofJakobson’s triadic classification as either an intralingual, interlingual or intersemiotic phenomenon, and the recurrent metaphorical usage of ‘translation’ in the humanities, social sciences and beyond. The concept is informed by the networked ontology of actor-network theory and embodies the idea that meanings and translation are created by means of social interactions rather than by language alone. It is suggested that sociological translation stands for any linguistic, material-semiotic transformations and social articulations, which are all enmeshed with IPS journalistic and interlingual translation practices. On the other hand, in view of the absence of methodological tools for studying nonlanguage-based translation in translation studies, I have assembled my own methodology drawing on the traditions of the wider humanities and the social sciences. My case study adopts Law’s ideas on method assemblage and Latour’s elaborations on infra-reflexivity which are well-suited for conveying the serendipity and messiness of ‘real-life’ research. It incorporates traditional ethnography, virtual ethnography and digital methods. Visualizing a network of sociological translations at different junctures as well outlining a holistic map of the concept allows one to observe the practices of journalist-editor-translators from both micro- and macro-perspectives. Finally, the studied phenomenon reflects modern conditions of life: non-stopping globalization and virtualization and is transdisciplinary in nature. Delineating and comparing the articulations of sociological translation in a wider connected and virtual context illuminates the concept’s mechanisms and contributes to the scholarly awareness of the complexity of news translation in a digital age. In conclusion, the thesis offers a new conceptual space within TS—translational sociology—which would strike up a conversation between TS and other disciplines in the social sciences with the goal of cross-fertilization of knowledge and finding better-informed interdisciplinary solutions to the shared problems including their linguistic, discursive and cultural aspects.

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