Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Special Issue on Translation No.5 May, 2016 Pp.108-123
Mediating Ideology in News Headlines: A Case Study of Post-Revolution Egypt
Hamza Ethelb
School of Modern Languages and Cultures
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, United Kingdom
Abstract:
The area of news translation is recently gaining increasing interest in Translation Studies. Research in this area has also begun to receive greater attention, although it remains less frequent in relation to Arabic translation. The intricacies of translating news lie in the fact that they are ideologically-loaded. This paper seeks to investigate the impact of ideology in mediating news headlines from English into Arabic. This study draws on Hatim and Mason’s (1997) distinction of the impingement of ideology on translation to meet a set of beliefs and systems of a particular media institution. For this study, 32 news headlines produced by Reuters covering Egypt’s post-Arab Spring uprising were examined. Of these, 22 of them were mediated by Al-Arabiya and 10 by Aljazeera on their Arabic webpages, and these were examined to see the degree of ideology mediation. The paper also investigates the nature of news translation, and asks whether this complex process is adequately and clearly defined within the field of Translation Studies. It has been shown that the news headlines have been ideologically mediated in a way that completely different from the original texts and conform to the news organizations’ political/ideological leanings. This resulted in reformulating a different Arabic version from the original.
Keywords: Al-Arabiya, Aljazeera, ideology, mediation, news