The Role of Language Ideology in Translating News Media: The Case of the Syrian War

Abstract

The objective of this study is to examine the role of ideology in translating news media, and the representation of language in the media. The framing approach and the framing of realities through the process of translation will be examined whereby ‘changes’ are made for ideological purposes in response to the attempts of the group of receptors and to ‘the norms’ of those receptors. The impact of language ideology on translation and the way in which translation serves cultural, political, religious or literary concepts continues to grow nowadays. Ideology is affecting the translation of the source texts in many types of discourses, among them the journalistic discourse which constitutes the subject of this study. How does ideology work? How is ideology conveyed through the translation of news media? What is its role and impact on the target texts? How does ideology influence the choices of translators? These are some of the questions which will be dealt with throughout this paper. The representation of language in media will be also studied with a particular attention to be given to the use of lexical choices that show how ideology appears in the source texts and the target texts, and to the validity and legitimacy of language which carries an ideological stamp. For the purpose of this study, a corpus of online news articles in English highlighting the war in Syria will be used in parallel with the translation of this corpus into Arabic by two opposite media outlets: the pro-regime and the anti-regime.