(MIS)TRANSLATING DECEIT: DISINFORMATION AS A TRANSLINGUAL, DISCURSIVE DYNAMIC

（错误）翻译欺骗：作为跨语言、话语动态的虚假信息

• 批准号: AH/X010007/1
• 负责人: Stephen Hutchings
• 金额: $ 107.01万
• 依托单位: University of Manchester
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FX010007%2F1
• 关键词: MIS; TRANSLATING; DECEIT; DISINFORMATION; TRANSLINGUAL

The Ukraine war, Covid-19 and the Trump presidency highlight the threat disinformation poses to democracy. Yet the implicit persistence of Cold War binaries - pitting democratic 'truth-telling' against totalitarian 'deceit', even in relation to homegrown disinformation - has seriously hampered attempts to counter this problem in the multipolar, Big Data age. The result is a glut of poorly differentiated terms: disinformation, misinformation, fake news, post-truth, and astroturfing, to name just a few. This dichotomous viewpoint heeds neither the contested meaning of disinformation, nor how the narratives it designates change across time, languages and cultures. These limitations explain the emergence of a 'Big Disinfo' industry: the burgeoning of monitoring initiatives whose success depends on maintaining the sense of an undifferentiated morass of toxicity rather than trying to draw out fine distinctions of language, meaning, culture or context. In conflating disinformation with related concepts like propaganda, conspiracy theories, and trolling, such reductionism obscures the operational modes of disinformation actors, furnishing them with counter-narratives that use the very lexicon deployed against them. By reconstructing disinformation's multiple border crossings - temporal, linguistic, cultural - (Mis)translating Deceit (MD) will radically re-orient existing approaches to disinformation. It will interrogate common misconceptions about disinformation, treating it as a translingual, historically mutating phenomenon forged within the socio-politically contingent realm of discourse. Big Disinfo's abiding focus on Kremlin malfeasance, bolstered by the Ukraine war, motivates our emphasis on multilingual narratives linked to Russia and the USSR. But by pinpointing the Russian node in a vast translingual network, we will create a model for identifying and combatting disinformation practices of diverse provenance. With impact at its core, MD proposes a potent interdisciplinary intervention, showcasing how humanities scholars can address major global challenges. Forging a novel, cross-sectoral collaborative model involving leading academics, the UK's top think tank, Chatham House, a European disinformation monitor (EUDisinfoLab) and OFCOM, it draws on expertise in history, translation studies, audience research, media studies and security policy. Its linguistic scope combines languages paramount to the history and theory of disinformation - Russian, English, and German - with supplementary data in Arabic, Serbian, French and Spanish (all spoken in areas of significance to Russia). It is structured around case studies focused on 5 multilingual narratives recently identified by disinformation trackers and 2 historical antecedents from the Cold War period. They are underpinned by a variant of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) inflected with Bakhtinian dialogism, translation studies and digital methods designed to reveal how narratives travel online and play out in fragmented social media format. The CDA dovetails with audience ethnography, and a unique Chatham House simulation methodology designed to test policy responses to disinformation in local contexts. We will answer questions about disinformation's mutation across borders of time and language, and the roles played by translation and counter-disinformation (e.g., fact checking) in shaping its meanings. The involvement of counter-disinformation practitioners guarantees the reflexive dimension key to a transformative Critical Disinformation Studies toolset we will create to capture the full disinformation production-consumption-response cycle. Outputs include a book, seminar series and journal articles pitched to media and reception studies, language-based area studies, history, translation studies and medical humanities. Our Chatham House-led impact programme will generate reports for stakeholders, including the FCO and DCMS, and a user-oriented version of our toolset.

乌克兰战争、新冠肺炎和特朗普总统任期凸显了虚假信息对民主构成的威胁。然而，冷战二元对立——民主的“说真话”与极权主义的“欺骗”，甚至与本土的虚假信息有关——的隐性持续存在，严重阻碍了在多极的大数据时代应对这一问题的努力。其结果是出现了大量区分不清的术语：disinformation、misinformation、fake news、post-truth和astroturfing，仅举几例。这种二分的观点既不考虑虚假信息的争议意义，也不考虑它所指定的叙事如何随着时间、语言和文化的变化而变化。这些限制解释了“大虚假信息”行业的出现：监控举措的蓬勃发展，其成功取决于保持一种无差别的毒性泥沼的感觉，而不是试图找出语言、意义、文化或背景的细微差别。在将虚假信息与宣传、阴谋论和拖网等相关概念混为一谈的过程中，这种还原论模糊了虚假信息行动者的操作模式，为他们提供了反叙事，这些反叙事使用的正是针对他们的词汇。通过重构虚假信息的多重边界——时间、语言、文化——（错误）翻译欺骗（MD）将从根本上重新定位现有的虚假信息方法。它将质疑关于虚假信息的常见误解，将其视为在社会政治偶然话语领域中形成的翻译语言，历史突变现象。大虚假信息对克里姆林宫渎职行为的持续关注，加上乌克兰战争的支持，促使我们把重点放在与俄罗斯和苏联有关的多语言叙事上。但是，通过在庞大的跨语言网络中精确定位俄罗斯节点，我们将创建一个模型，用于识别和打击各种来源的虚假信息。以影响为核心，MD提出了一种强有力的跨学科干预，展示了人文学者如何应对重大的全球挑战。该项目建立了一种新颖的跨部门合作模式，包括顶尖学者、英国顶级智库查塔姆研究所（Chatham House）、欧洲虚假信息监测机构（EUDisinfoLab）和英国通信管理局（OFCOM），它利用了历史、翻译研究、受众研究、媒体研究和安全政策方面的专业知识。它的语言范围结合了对虚假信息的历史和理论至关重要的语言-俄语，英语和德语-以及阿拉伯语，塞尔维亚语，法语和西班牙语（所有在对俄罗斯有重要意义的地区使用）的补充数据。它的结构围绕案例研究，重点关注最近由虚假信息追踪者发现的5种多语言叙述和冷战时期的2个历史先例。它们的基础是批评性话语分析（CDA）的一种变体，受巴赫蒂安式对话、翻译研究和数字方法的影响，这些方法旨在揭示叙事如何在网上传播，并在碎片化的社交媒体格式中发挥作用。CDA与受众人种学和查塔姆研究所独特的模拟方法相吻合，该方法旨在测试当地背景下对虚假信息的政策反应。我们将回答有关虚假信息跨越时间和语言边界的突变的问题，以及翻译和反虚假信息（例如，事实检查）在塑造其含义方面所起的作用。反虚假信息从业者的参与保证了反身维度的关键，这是我们将创建的变革性批判性虚假信息研究工具集的关键，以捕捉完整的虚假信息生产-消费-反应周期。产出包括一本书、一系列研讨会和期刊文章，内容涉及媒体和接待研究、基于语言的地区研究、历史、翻译研究和医学人文。我们的查塔姆研究所主导的影响项目将为包括英国外交部和英国国防部在内的利益相关者提供报告，以及我们的工具集面向用户的版本。