Selective appropriation in the BBC news translated into Ukrainian and Russian

Abstract

Drawing on previous research into the translation practices of the BBC, this study conducts a critical analysis of the Ukrainian and Russian versions of three news reports originally published in English on the BBC News website. The news reports are of different relevance to the target audiences and have been selected from a corpus of 60 news reports (20 in each language) to show the most typical strategies used by the Ukrainian and Russian services of the BBC in the translation of news covering politics. The focus of the analysis is on omissions, additions, substitutions and permutations in the target texts in Ukrainian and Russian and their ideological implications. The findings indicate that the Ukrainian versions of news, albeit adapted considerably to the presumed needs of the new target audience, remain ideologically similar to the English source texts, with minor exceptions, while the Russian versions tend to be significantly reframed through omissions and additions and look more ambiguous than the English source texts when the latter portray Russia in an unfavourable light.