The Ideological Stamp: Translation of Political Discourse in News Media

A Master of Arts Thesis in Translation and Interpreting (Arabic/English) by Rima Malkawi Entitled, "The Ideological Stamp: Translation of Political Discourse in News Media," submitted in June 2011. Available are both hard and soft copies of the thesis.

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine the way the ideological stamp manipulates the translation of political discourse in news media and how it affects accuracy in the translation process. In the ideal world, news media, mainly news reports, are expected to present information objectively in order to allow readers to make up their own minds. However, this thesis argues that translation, particularly in the context of media discourse about Arab-Muslim political affairs with the western world, is not a mere linguistic tool in the field of political media but, rather, is utilized as a tool of ideological manipulation. With this in mind, an English source text which belongs to The Times News Network as well as its two juxtaposed translation-sourced Arabic target texts, which belong to two separate news networks (Aljazeera, Al-Alam) are analyzed through the application of both Critical Discourse Analysis and translation discourse analysis. The analysis reveals the critical role of ideology in manipulating the production of news reports. The analysis also indicates that the inaccuracy and mistranslation of the extracted political samples of news reports are motivated by a wider prospective of political, ideological editorial stance. Consequently, intentional and inaccurate news media translation of such nature must be distinguished from the mistranslation caused by the incompetence of the translator.