Al Jazeera In 1000 Academic Studies

155. Name: Samir Khidir Title: “Localization” 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) Institution: University of Ottawa Country: Canada Date: 2017 Language: English Abstract: This study is a critical discourse 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 by applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and qualitative descriptive methods in the analysis of the localized news items, interviews with translators, and a corpus of comments by the Arabic-speaking readership. The data analyzed in this case study comprise a four-year (2010-2014) collection of news items that were localized by Al Jazeera and published on its website, as well as readers’ commentaries on such localizations, and interviews with two of Al Jazeera’s translators. The main results of the analysis show that Al Jazeera ostensibly promulgates three major ideologies: anti-regimism, Islamism, and pan-Arabism. It embeds these ideologies in the messages it delivers to its target locales through the localized news items. The study concludes that Al Jazeera’s localization 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 neighbors within a dichotomy of the ‘same’ and the ‘other’.

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