Changing the Structure of Paragraphs and Texts in Arabic: A Case from News Reporting

Abstract

This study explores the textual alterations of Arabic news structure and how it has been influenced by news texts produced in English. The paper precisely examines sentence, paragraph and text structures in terms of form and content in relation to news translation. It analyses news articles collated from Aljazeera and Al-Arabiya news networks. The collated corpus is translations from English into Arabic by these two media outlets. The analysis showed considerable changes that the form of Arabic textual structures has incurred, especially in the general layout of texts. Although it confirm Hatim’s (1997) text-type categorisation with regard to argumentation in Arabic news texts that Arabic lacks argumentative elements it news content, it exhibited significant shift in internal cohesion, paragraph transitions, and syntactic patterns. These changes could emanate from many other influencing factors, but translation is definitely one.