Television and Cultural Translation in the United States

• In Event: Discourses of Stability, Change, Exchange: Cultural Translation and Global Television Studies

Abstract

Debates about global media have historically focused on the United States as a site of program production and export. Such debates overlook the circulation of global programming within the United States itself. This paper proposes a new vocabulary, that of cultural translation, to describe such global programming. It identifies two modes of cultural translation — first, the use of a domestic vocabulary to describe a foreign culture, and second, the reinscription of a foreign text in a new locale, where its foreignness remains intact — that apply, first, to news programming, and second, to telenovelas on U.S. TV.

Author

• Kyle Conway, University of North Dakota