Reframing Ideology in English-Arabic Political News Translation: Fairclough’s ThreeDimensional CDA Approach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34630/e-rei.vi14.7443Keywords:
reframing, English-Arabic news translation, ideology, Fairclough’s threedimensional model, Critical Discourse AnalysisAbstract
This study investigates how ideology is constructed through discursive reframing in the translation of political news from English into Arabic by operationalizing Fairclough’s threedimensional CDA model. Using a corpus of translated reports from online newspapers, the analysis systematically compares source (English) and target (Arabic) texts across three interdependent levels: (A) text: lexico-syntactic choices and pragmatic implicatures, (B) discursive practice: institutional conditions of production, editing, and consumption, and (C) sociocultural practice: historical memory and dominant narratives. Findings indicate that seemingly minor shifts, like “suicide operations” to “martyrdom operations” and “entering” to “storming”, operate as reframing triggers that redirect agency allocation and moral evaluation of social actors. The translations also deploy strategies such as rhetorical understatement and evaluative additions, often aligned with the ideological stance of the publishing outlet (including pro-government patterns). The study concludes that translational reframing functions as intercultural mediation with tangible effects on cross-cultural reception and the reproduction of sociopolitical consensus.
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