Of Heroes and Terrorists. Narratives, Categorization, Corpora, and Translation

This chapter discusses news reports in English and in Italian concerning an event that occurred near East Jerusalem in October 2022. It employs a multifaceted approach, combining narrative analysis, membership categorization analysis, and corpus-based studies. Mona Baker has highlighted how translation can instigate a narrative transformation through techniques like exploiting framing ambiguities, selective appropriation, and labelling. It will be argued that the creation of alternative narratives via these techniques can be attributed to categorization methods. Categorization procedures, in turn, stem from the negotiation of categories embedded in shared background knowledge, as emerging in data drawn from extensive news corpora. In this regard, language corpora, whose pivotal contribution to translation studies was initially championed by Baker, also play a significant role in the analysis.