Journalistic transcreation: translation strategies for political neologisms in international news

Abstract

This study examines journalistic transcreation, understood as the creative adaptation of translation to align a text with the cultural, contextual, and communicative expectations of its target audience (Petrović, 2023; Verplaetse, 2024). Unlike more conventional translation approaches, transcreation is characterized by a high degree of creativity, the exploitation of lexical resources to generate novel linguistic constructions, and the comprehensive rewriting of source texts, including the selection of culturally relevant content. Such operations are particularly significant in international journalism, where the circulation of news depends not only on fidelity to the source text but also on its effective reception across different linguistic and cultural communities. The study draws on a corpus of news articles originally published in Portuguese and analyses their English-language versions, focusing on political neologisms and ad hoc lexical formations (Rey, 1977; Alves, 1990; Cabré, 1999; Biderman, 2001). These lexical items pose distinctive translational challenges (Venuti, 2019), as they frequently encapsulate ideological, cultural, and discursive meanings that lack direct equivalents in the target language. The findings reveal that the solutions adopted form a continuum ranging from straightforward formal transfer to full transcreation. Overall, more conservative translation choices predominate, with comparatively limited use of creative strategies that might enhance engagement for international readers. These findings highlight the debate on translation practices in the journalistic domain, investigating the strategies and lexical choices, and the complexity of transcreation in journalistic discourse and underscore the need for a more nuanced discussion of its potential and limitations as a translation strategy. More broadly, the study contributes to ongoing debates on the role of creativity in lexical translation, particularly in contexts involving the linguistic innovation that characterizes contemporary political discourse.