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Article published In: Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts
Vol. 1:2 (2015) ► pp.135–161

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Ideology and Arabic translations of news texts

 | Lebanese University
Published online: 20 August 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ttmc.1.2.01baz
Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis, the present paper seeks to identify the ideological factors that may characterize politically motivated news texts and the text strategies that articulate them in an English-Arabic translation context. Two hundred source texts and target texts representing political turmoil and conflict in the Middle East (2011–2014) were examined for contrastive analysis. Data were collected through archival research of Assafir, the leading national newspaper in Lebanon, in addition to international media outlets, such as Reuters, AFP, and the BBC. The descriptive analysis of both source and target texts reveals that the functional organization of clauses and sentences, lexical categorization, and modal expressions in the news language can be seen as representing sectarian discourses, and the exercise of power found in the media in times of political struggle. The ideological factors identified in this study are related to the notions of hegemony, the rhetoric of worthy versus unworthy victims, interpellation of subjects, and group schema.
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