This book presents the large-scale investigation of syntactic borrowing in contemporary French. The investigation centres on an aspect of syntactic borrowing that can be subject to the kind of rigorous analysis that is required of linguistic studies to provide an understanding of news translation.

It is widely held that the large-scale translation of international news from English will lead to changes in French syntax. For the first time this assumption is put to the test using extensive fieldwork carried out in an international news agency and a corpus of translated news agency dispatches. The linguistic analysis of three syntactic structures in the translations is complemented by an investigation of the effects of a range of factors including, most notably, the speed at which the translation is carried out. The analysis sheds new light on the ways in which news translation could lead to syntactic borrowing in French, and by extension, in other languages.