“Localisation” and the “Arab Spring”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Translation-Mediated Arabic News Articles on the Unrest in the Arabic-Speaking World (The Case of Robert Fisk and Al Jazeera)
Creators: name: Khidir, Samir
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2017
Subjects: Keywords: Localisation, locale, translation-mediated news items, acculturation, Descriptive Translation Studies, critical discourse analysis, netnography, media agenda, mainstreamism, Islamistism, pan-Arabism.
Mots-clés: localisation, environnement local, articles de nouvelles traduits, acculturation, traductologie descriptive, analyse critique du discours, netnographie, objectifs des médias, mainstreamisme, islamistisme, panarabisme.

description: This study is a critical analysis of translation-mediated Arabic news items on the “Arab Spring”. It explores the influence of social, historical, political, localic, and socio-ideological aspects of news translation via certain media agendas, by applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and qualitative descriptive methods in the analysis of the localised news items, interviews with translators, and a corpus of comments by the Arabic-speaking readership. The data analysed in this case study comprise a four-year (2010-2014) collection of news items that were localised by Al Jazeera and published on its website, as well as readers’ commentaries on said localisations, and interviews with two of Al Jazeera’s translators. Making use of this rich source of data, this study aims at finding answers for the questions: Are there discernible patterns in the translated texts? If so, how and for what purpose are they produced and re-produced through localisation in Al Jazeera’s translation-mediated Arabic news articles? Whose interests are served and whose interests are annulled by the reproduction and localisation processes? The three sets of data were thematically coded; then their most salient points and arguments were analysed. The localised news items were examined for clues to the localisation techniques, ideologies, and the agenda(s) of Al Jazeera. The readers’ comments were probed for the influence that the localised news items had on Al Jazeera’s target readership, and were examined to find out which of Al Jazeera’s ideologies resonate with which readers to form Al Jazeera’s target locale(s). The analysis of the interviews with Al Jazeera’s translators was undertaken with the aim of delineating the tasks of these translators, specifically to see to what extent journalism and translation meld, as suggested in much of the research done so far on translating news items. The tripartite analysis has provided a more comprehensive understanding of the processes involved in the production of translation-mediated news items as well as their effect on the readership. It also suggests relatively new insights into viewing the term localisation as a good alternative to acculturation in accounting for news translation. Within the umbrella of the social turn in translation studies (TS), this study suggests that current approaches to studying news translation question large-scale concepts such as culture and acculturation, and proposes they be replaced with the small-scale concepts of locale and localisation. Hence, this study suggests using localisation to extract and understand the underlying particulars of the processes involved in producing translation-mediated news items. The results of the analysis show that Al Jazeera ostensibly promulgates three major ideologies: anti-regimism, Islamistism, and pan-Arabism and embeds these ideologies in the messages it delivers to its target locales through the localised news items. The study concludes that Al Jazeera’s localisation techniques reflect the viewpoints of its benefactor the State of Qatar whose goal is to create a solipsistic identity that distinguishes it from its immediate rivalling neighbours within a dichotomy of the Same and the Other. These localisation techniques are driven by motives associated with the sociopolitical and sociohistorical circumstances of the founding of the State of Qatar and Al Jazeera.