Digital Repository for faculty of Languages

The role of translators in news reporting has recently been gaining increasing attention. The process of translating news seems to be influenced by the ideological and political preferences of the news networks. This paper aims to investigate the influence of news organisations on the practices of news translation; that is, the social practices within an institution promoting a particular discourse, ideology or belief. It underlines the role of news translators/journalists in media discourse. It also looks at whether news translators, or journalists, are influenced by the ideological tendencies or political leanings of news institutions. In addition, the paper situates the topic of news translation within the ideological turn of Translation Studies. For the purpose of this enquiry, news articles were collected from Aljazeera and Al-Arabiya to see how translation is being conducted in news agencies. This study shows that news items can be ideologically altered to conform with the news organisations values by using a number of translation strategies. These alterations occur on the textual and lexical levels of the news items, making them carry a different representation of the news story at hand.
Hamza Ethelb(1-2019)

One news event may be represented differently by different news organizations. Research in news representation remains sparse in Arabic. This article investigates some of the linguistic and textual devices used in journalistic texts. It looks at the way these devices are used to influence public opinion. This gives rise to significance of conducting this research. This study uses these devices within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). For the purpose of this study, four news articles produced by Aljazeera and Al-Arabiya were examined under CDA in order to show how journalists structure their news stories to imply an ideological stance. The analysis showed that Aljazeera and Al-Arabiya represented the people and the police differently, each according to their ideological and political leanings. This resulted in the public having different opinions of the event.
Hamza Ethelb(1-2020)

The thematic and information structure of scientific and technical texts are arguably different among languages. This study examines the thematic structure of scientific texts in English and Arabic to see the differences in the hierarchical organization at different thematic levels. It adopts Halliday’s functional model of theme-rheme and applies it to English and Arabic scientific texts. The paper mainly investigates the three levels of theme: textual, interpersonal and experiential with the intention of discussing their translations into Arabic. It uses a corpus data of two scientific texts. The syntactic and textual elements of those texts were compared and contrasted and professional translations were provided to study the Arabic thematic structure. The data provides English and Arabic versions which allow for a comparable analysis of structure, convention and style. The study reveals that the most frequent type of themes and thematic progression is the experiential theme. It shows that those experiential themes are almost always occupying initial positions. The structure of themes has the tendency to be reproduced in the translation. However, the findings of this investigation indicate that position of themes may change as a result of translation, or changed from experiential into textual.
Hamza Ethelb(8-2019)

The area of news translation is recently gaining increasing interest in Translation Studies. Research in this area has also begun to receive greater attention, although it remains less frequent in relation to Arabic translation. The intricacies of translating news lie in the fact that they are ideologically-loaded. This paper seeks to investigate the impact of ideology in mediating news headlines from English into Arabic. This study draws on Hatim and Mason's (1997) distinction of the impingement of ideology on translation to meet a set of beliefs and systems of a particular media institution. For this study, 32 news headlines produced by Reuters covering Egypt's post-Arab Spring uprising were examined. Of these, 22 of them were mediated by Al-Arabiya and 10 by Aljazeera on their Arabic webpages, and these were examined to see the degree of ideology mediation. The paper also investigates the nature of news translation, and asks whether this complex process is adequately and clearly defined within the field of Translation Studies. It has been shown that the news headlines have been ideologically mediated in a way that completely different from the original texts and conform to the news organizations’ political/ideological leanings. This resulted in reformulating a different Arabic version from the original.
Hamza Ethelb(5-2016)

Machine translation tools are widely used by companies. The tools are on an increasing demand. Translators need to equip themselves with the knowledge and the mastering of these tools. This study explores two machine translation tools involved in website localization. These tools are Alchemy Catalyst and Trados Tageditor. The study adopts an evaluative methodology to shed light on the intricacies and technicalities of these two localization tools. It discusses some of the cultural issues that localizers come across in the process of localization. In addition, it delves into the technical issues, mainly focusing on localizing into Arabic with a special focus on string, text, lexis, and orthography. The study concludes that the process of localization requires teamwork and involvement of computer engineers, and both localization tools are valuable in achieving a localization task.
Hamza Ethelb(8-2019)

This article explores translation in news institutions. While being heavily relied on by media organizations, translation is rarely acknowledged. Translation is deeply interwoven with news in that it is used to employ ideological tendencies and political agendas. This study investigates the powerful role of media institution as a force that intervenes in producing news reports. It uses a questionnaire and interviews to see the influence of editors in the translation of news texts. For this purpose, the views of 21 news translators, journalists and news were surveyed to infer the role of institutions in translation. The study looks at this role from different angles including translator training, instructions given to translators, textual alterations, and policies of news institutions. The findings indicate that intervention by the editors and producers on translation is taking place. The interview participants tend to agree with the intervention of the institution. The questionnaire respondents agree with the statement that translators are given instructions to use specific terminology but disagree with a statement that they have to comply with the policies of the institution.
Hamza Ethelb(5-2020)

This article explores the translation of dialects on-screen within the Jordanian context. Such place of translation is arguably one of the most challenging areas of translation, yet interesting due to its variety. Arab peoples use their dialects to express their opinions on several platforms, including TV media. Audiovisual translation research is growing in investigating subtitling Arabic dialects and languages on screen. Scholars propose a dialect-to-dialect approach or a dialect-to-standard approach. However, in this paper the focus is more on the strategies which inevitably fall within those approaches. The study uses a Jordanian film known as Captain Abu Raed as a source of highlighting and demonstrating translation of dialects within an Arabic context. The initial findings show that some dialectal expressions are taken off or sacrificed by replacing them with neutralized standard language.
Hamza Ethelb(10-2019)

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.
Hamza Ethelb(7-2019)