Al Jazeera’s Para-Textual Reframing of The Atlantic and Foreign Affairs Coverage of The 2022 Russian-Ukrainian War

Abstract

The Russian-Ukrainian War, which began in February 2022, has recently become a trend and attracted the attention of different news agencies. This paper examines the paratextual components of ten news articles on the Russian-Ukrainian War. The source articles are extracted from The Atlantic and Foreign Affairs, while the Arabic translation is retrieved from Al Jazeera website. In this paper, the narrative theory is adopted (Baker, 2018) since it is a dynamic and flexible approach that emphasizes the role of translators and interpreters as active participants in constructing reality. The English articles with their Arabic counterparts were compared, and the parts that were paratextually reframed in the translated versions were identified. Investigating how Al Jazeera reframed the Russian-Ukrainian War through translation, Al Jazeera appears to sometimes create different, diverse, and contradictory versions of the narrative. This may result in various and, sometimes, different views of the same story. The findings showed that the paratextual framing strategies utilized by Al Jazeera to reframe the Russian-Ukrainian War include titles, subheadings, introductions, and footnotes. The paper concludes that the war is framed in the source texts in line with the source media outlets‘ agenda and is then reframed in the target language through translation. The entire process might affect how the target audience views the event under study.