The impact of media ideology on translating news: a study investigating how media outlets deal with the Arab Spring – the case of post-revolution Egypt

The aim of this thesis is to explore how the institutional and ideological practices of news media can impact on translating news articles by focusing on the ideological representations in media discourse. It also tests the hypothesis that hidden ideologies in news texts are changed/re-presented (or maintained) when translated into another target text, taking into account the socio-cultural practices followed by news institutions. The thesis applies a Critical Discourse Analysis model to analyse issues of textuality, lexicality, cohesion and coherence in a range of media texts. It also investigates strategies and techniques adopted by news translators when transferring news articles from English into Arabic. To do this, it uses a corpus of 63 news articles collated from Aljazeera and Al-Arabiya websites under two themes (labelled Morsi-Sisi and protest) to identify the textual, ideological, and institutional representations and alterations happening through translation. The thesis also uses this data to examine the relationship between news writing in English and Arabic. Along with this, the data includes surveys in a form of interviews and a questionnaire delivered to a range of journalists and news editors involved in translating news. Their input is analysed qualitatively to find out how translation operates and how ideologies impinge upon translation products in media institutions. The thesis enhances our understanding of the role of translators who work in ideology-driven institutions. It shows that it is possible for a news translator to carry out minor or major alterations to a news story under translation for the purpose of ideologically reorienting their message or text-focus. It demonstrates that the editorial policies of news institutions function as the socio-political factors to maintain existing power or usurp it through translation practices. From the news audience point of view, it reveals that Aljazeera and Al-Arabiya intentionally blur news sources so that readers would trust the source without realising that the target text is very different