On France, terrorism, and the English press: Examining the impact of style in the news

This chapter is part of a larger study of British, Spanish, and Swiss news reporting on terrorist events in France; “translation” is understood here as the transfer of culture rather than of language per se. I apply a predominantly qualitative approach that draws upon both prior research (for example, Brownlie, 2010; Conway, 2012; Davier, 2009, 2015) and translation criticism (Hewson, 2011; Riggs, 2014) to online news from the Guardian and the Telegraph, in order to answer the following questions: how do mainstream English news articles portray France and the French as they report on a recent terrorist attack in France? In particular, how do stylistic elements shape their representations? Only rarely has style been recognized as a feature of non-literary texts (for example, Boase-Beier 2011; Simpson, 2004). Recently, however, Federici has called specifically for applying stylistics to the study of on-line news and highlighted the “urgent need to fill the research gap concerning the linguistic elements of cultural interactions in emergencies” (Federici 2016, p. 19). This chapter demonstrates the value of examining stylistic elements in terror-related news and the ways they contribute to reinforcing or challenging representations which “other” foreign and/or minority groups – a significant issue given the media’s influence on public opinion, cultural debate and policy.