Dialogue in and between Different Cultures - International ...

74 Natàlia Izard & Clara-Ubaldina Lorda
two countries and accounts for the level of knowledge and interest for each
other.
2. The comparative analysis
These hypotheses have lead us to compare different accounts of the same story by
different television channels: first, a source news item in the country where the
event happened, in this case France. Then, several channels in the target country,
Spain.
Since these two countries belong to the European Union, our research should
provide us with
− Some clues about the quality of the cultural dialogue in this context, after
observing the level of knowledge and interest of the Spanish mass media in
problems that happen in situations that are, after all, socially and economically
similar.
− The comparison of several Spanish channels should show us different
modalities of this ‘cultural translation’.
We start from the theoretical framework of discourse linguistics, which implies
the articulation of situational and textual analysis. From this perspective, by
taking into account the regularities in the genre, we can see the elements which
are the object of comparison: first, the characteristics of the relation of events, its
contextualization, the cultural references given and the explanations added; and,
second, the choice and the social representation of the actors and the illustrating
images; and, third, some translation issues in the Spanish news.
Our corpus is made of
− The news from March 16 th 2006, in the Journal de 20 heures in the French
channel F2, on the demonstrations against the Contrat de Première Embauche
law, the ‘First Job Contract’ that the French Government tried to pass.
− The evening news from March 16 th and 17 th – on the first day, the Spanish
channels only gave a general survey on La 2 and on Cuatro (Spanish national
channels) and TV3 (the Catalan regional channel)
3. The Contrat Première Embauche
The Contrat Première Embauche (henceforth CPE) was a failed attempt by the
conservative government to reform the job market in France. The law proposing
this contract was presented in January 2006 in the general frame of the loi sur
l’égalité des chances (a positive action law). It was meant for people under 26 and
for company workforces over 20. It proposed that during the first two years of the
worker’s first contract, the employer could lay off the worker at any time, simply