The Impact of Freelance Translators’ Ideology on Mediating Libyan Political News Headlines

Abstract

News translation plays a significant role in a variety of news production and it is recently gaining increasing interest in translation Studies. This field of research has also begun to receive more attention, although it remains less frequent concerning Arabic translation. The complication of translating political news headlines relies on the fact that they are filled with ideological shifts. The current study is meant to investigate the impact of ideology on mediating political news headlines from English into Arabic. This study draws on Hatim and Mason's (1997) distinction of the influence of ideology on translation and how it changes according to freelance translators. For this study, the researcher selected seven political news headlines from the two famous English webpages BBC and RT about the events that occurred in Libya’s capital (Tripoli). The news headlines were analyzed by using textual analysis and given as a translation test to ten freelance translators from different parts of Libya to detect the degree of ideology mediation. The result of the study shows that news headlines have been ideologically mediated, mostly minimal mediation, which manifested as evident that the freelance translators are faithful to the source text.