Cross-cultural representations: The construction of 'America' after September 11th in English Canadian, Quebec and French print media

The cultural turn in Translation Studies is the name given to the shift from an inter-lingual approach to the study of translation to an inter-cultural one. Since the cultural turn, meaning is no longer considered to be reducible to the level of word, sentence or even text within a specific situation of utterance. Instead, culture as a whole is considered to be the prime locus of meaning. Translators, then, are not expected to be simply bilingual, but to be bi-cultural.; This thesis is a comparative discourse analysis that explores how pre-existing discourses in English Canada, Quebec and France affect the representation of the United States in print media coverage following terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001. More specifically, the impact of the discourse of counter-Americanism in English Canada is analyzed in a corpus of newspaper articles selected from five major Canadian dailies. Similarly, articles from Le Devoir and La Presse are analyzed in relation to the discourse of americanite in Quebec and articles from Le Monde are analyzed in relation to the discourse of anti-Americanism in France. In each case, the construction of an American identity can be traced to the specific geographical, historical, political and economic relationships of each country to the U.S. This means that representations of an American Other serve primarily to support representations of self, thus revealing the relative and constructed nature of national identity.; Drawing on scholars in both Cultural Studies and Communications, this study outlines how discourse constructs national identity. In addition, it illustrates how identity discourses affect the construction and interpretation of meaning, thus meriting attention in the field of Translation Studies. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...