The Translator as Journalist: Getting Across the Ideological Intricacies of Translating News

Date

2019-1

Type

Article

Journal title

Studies in Translation

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 5

Author(s)

Hamza Ethelb

Abstract

The role of translators in news reporting has recently been gaining increasing attention. The process of translating news seems to be influenced by the ideological and political preferences of the news networks. This paper aims to investigate the influence of news organisations on the practices of news translation; that is, the social practices within an institution promoting a particular discourse, ideology or belief. It underlines the role of news translators/journalists in media discourse. It also looks at whether news translators, or journalists, are influenced by the ideological tendencies or political leanings of news institutions. In addition, the paper situates the topic of news translation within the ideological turn of Translation Studies. For the purpose of this enquiry, news articles were collected from Aljazeera and Al-Arabiya to see how translation is being conducted in news agencies. This study shows that news items can be ideologically altered to conform with the news organisations values by using a number of translation strategies. These alterations occur on the textual and lexical levels of the news items, making them carry a different representation of the news story at hand.

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