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ABSTRACT
The main purpose of this study is to point out linguistic phenomena involved in the
transformation of interviews with scientists into news texts published by the daily press. We
have used as our theoretical base, principally studies by Marcuschi on the relationship
between talk and writing and Van Dijk on the transformation of font-texts into news texts.
The "Jornal do Commercio" of Recife was chosen as the target-vehicle for this
investigation because it has published since 1989 the "Ciência / Meio Ambiente" section
with a specialized staff on environment, science and technology. For the analysis, we used
four sets of texts (interview-journalistic text) that permited us to identify the main linguistic
operations and the effects of this kind of transformation on the propositional content. Our
analysis showed substantial changes between interview and journalistic text, but, in general,
the main idea from the original text is preserved. As we had foreseen in our hypothesis, the
inexactness attributed by scientists to scientific news texts are much more a question of a
change in the point of interest than a question of informational distortion. Although a case
study, we believe that our conclusions indicate what frequently happens in the
transformation of interviews into texts of scientific divulgation by the daily press. In order
to increase our knowledge of this aspect of scientific journalism, we intend to continue this
study, analyzing other periodicals, specially those with a nationwide circulation.