SPOTLIGHT ON… LUCILE DAVIER

Lucile Davier has a PhD in translation and communication studies. She has held the post of assistant professor in the French Unit at the FTI’s translation department since July 1, 2022. She was a visiting scholar at KU Leuven (Belgium) in 2012-2013 and the University of Ottawa (Canada) in 2016-2017. Her main research focus is media translation. We invited her to discuss her new project « South-North flows of information through translation in the global news agency AFP », launched in October 2024.

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Professor Davier, can you tell us about your new research project?

« South–North flows of information through translation in the global news agency AFP » grew out of meeting outstanding scholars at various points in my academic career – Marlie van Rooyen and Éric Lagneau towards the end of my PhD, then soon after I was appointed professor, Natalia Rodríguez-Blanco. Marlie is South African, Éric is French, and Natalia is Bolivian. We all come from completely different places but we all share a keen interest in the background hum of translation in the media. Translation shapes the information reaching us daily from all corners of the globe, but few readers are aware of it. We discussed and compared events from each of our respective countries: did South African, French and Swiss media cover the 2024 armed uprising against Luis Arce in Bolivia? If so, in what terms? Why does climate change not seem to receive much media coverage in South Africa? This gave rise to the idea of collaboration between the global South and the global North. Our project is co-funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and its South African equivalent, the NRF. Marlie and I are principal investigators for the project, and we each have a postdoc working with us – Nadia Lahdili at the University of the Free State in South Africa and Natalia Rodríguez-Blanco here in Geneva.

What is the project goal?

The SNSF-NRF project looks at Agence France-Presse (AFP), a key stakeholder in the media landscape, and its role in disseminating news worldwide. First of all, we are observing how translation is built into the daily work of journalists, both text and multimedia, and the tools that influence their practices, such as machine translation. Secondly, we are tracking news dispatches and videos from the AFP bureaus in Africa and America to media clients via regional desks where the news is selected and translated. What subjects and sources are deemed relevant for clients in the global North? Thirdly, almost all AFP sales of dispatches and videos are to other media, so we want to find out what products are taken up in the media in the global South and the global North. Are there news flows within the global South and from global South to global North? If so, this would contradict research so far on news agencies.

What methodology are you using?

For the initial phase, outlined in my previous answer, we are drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), a well-known methodology developed by sociologists Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, among others. ANT calls for field work to study human actors (for instance journalists) and non-human actors (for instance AI). This is the phase we are working on at the moment. Natalia is just back from two weeks of shadowing and interviews at AFP’s Colombia bureau. The data will be different in phases two and three, but the methodology will be the same. We are building a corpus of dispatches, infographics and videos that we will run through computational analysis to identify the predominant themes, like the economy and sport, and news sources, like civil society and politicians, depending on the language service and therefore the target audience. We also take a qualitative approach to compare a smaller set of originals and translations.

What challenges have you run into?

What has taken most time in setting up the project has been negotiating AFP access. It’s a huge organisation with 2,600 staff across five continents. Its timelines are very different to those in the research world, which are far longer-term. Negotiating access took up a lot of time, particularly due to regular staff turnover at the head office and in local bureaus, but it was all worth it in the end. Data gathered in the field is always extremely rich. The project would never have got off the ground without our partner Éric Lagneau, an associate researcher at the EHESS (France) and an AFP journalist himself; AFP’s steering committee; and the generosity of the journalists who hosted our teams on site. I’d like to thank them publicly here for their time, their trust, and their enthusiasm.

Would you like to mention any aspect of the project in particular?

Working closely with female scholars from the global South has been a vital process of de-centering. For me, living comfortably in Switzerland, it’s been a real lesson in humility seeing them put in a request for two days’ leave and drive 400 kilometres to make a visa application to attend a conference, move right across the globe to work on a subject close to their hearts, or build their working day around water and power cuts. For Éric and me, taking part in a meeting in the other hemisphere will force us out of our comfort zone to deal with the heat at a point in the year when we’re more used to wrapping up warm before heading outside. Our team discussions also help hone our view of the global South.

What is the project’s specific scope?

I hope we can remind people that translation is everywhere in our societies. It’s not an activity on the decline, but a crucial component of our everyday lives, even if we don’t notice it when half-listening to the news. Translation cannot be untangled from selecting and disseminating the news. Journalists can choose to leave out a news item because it’s not in their language, or simplify it because they feel their audience does not have the wherewithal to understand it. Not for nothing did news agencies carve up worldwide territories between themselves in the nineteenth century. The news is closely bound up with issues of power. When the news is produced in multiple languages, translation is one of those issues. That’s what makes it important to understand its inner workings.