Translating the EU’s defence turn in the Turkish press: Between ‘Rearm Europe’ and ‘Readiness 2030’

This study examines the European Union’s emerging defence discourse through the translation of the terms ‘ReArm Europe’ and ‘Readiness 2030’ in the selected Turkish news corpus. The aim is to reveal how the EU’s discourse on defence readiness, deterrence, military capability and strategic autonomy is represented in Turkish news reports through processes of translation, rewriting and reframing. To this end, we examined a source-linked corpus comprising European Commission documents, an English-language Euronews report and Turkish news articles published between March and April 2025. The study approaches news translation as an institutional practice of rewriting involving selection, omission, addition, reordering and titling, while the analysis brings together approaches to news translation, transediting, framing and recontextualisation. The findings show that these reports neither consistently intensify nor soften the EU’s defence discourse; instead, they selectively foreground dimensions such as rearmament, defence preparedness, strategic autonomy and democratic legitimacy. The article argues that the selected texts construct the EU’s emerging security identity differently through translation and news production, highlighting the constitutive role of news translation in the mediation of EU policy in news reporting outside the Union. This study contributes to news translation research by showing how translation and editorial intervention reshape institutional political discourse.