Verbal and visual communication in constructive news across cultures: A case study of a bilingual English-Spanish corpus with a focus on metaphor

A global but under-recognized phenomenon, constructive news is an alternative to predominantly negative news. While it is known to have positive effects on readers, the nuts and bolts of the language and images that achieve these effects are under-researched. Drawing on theories and approaches from metaphor studies, news translation studies and (multimodal) discourse analysis, this article compares the use of verbal and visual/multimodal metaphor and visual metonymy in a bilingual corpus of UK and Spanish online constructive news, also considering them in the light of an interview with an employee of the Spanish news outlet. The findings shed light on how constructive news is ‘done’ across languages and cultures and suggest ways in which news translation studies and metaphor studies may benefit from each other's approaches.