Translating Political Discourse in Arabic News titles: Ideology and Framing

Abstract

This study examines how two transnational Arabic news outlets translated and recontextualized English political statements during the 12-day Iran–Israel war of June 2025. A purpose-built, source-controlled comparable corpus aligned 27 verified English political propositions with one Al Arabiya and one Sky News Arabia rendering, yielding 54 source–target comparisons drawn from 47 unique Arabic articles. A single Arabic–English bilingual coder analyzed source match, translation and recontextualization strategy, modality and evaluation, social-actor representation, agency, responsibility, and framing. The analysis integrated research on journalistic translation with Munday’s model of evaluation, van Leeuwen’s social-actor framework, Entman’s framing functions, and Baker’s narrative approach. Fifteen paired units (55.6%) showed substantive convergence and 12 (44.4%) showed divergence. Close translation was the most frequent operation in both outlets, although Sky News Arabia used paraphrase more often. The most consequential contrasts involved certainty, explicit violence, actor visibility, causal responsibility, metaphor, discourse presentation, specificity, and headline salience. These shifts sometimes strengthened, weakened, or redirected problem definitions, causal attributions, and evaluations, whereas diplomatic and de-escalatory recommendations were generally preserved. Because intensification and mitigation occurred in both outlets and convergence remained slightly more common than divergence, the findings support selective, context-dependent recontextualization rather than a stable outlet-wide ideological transformation. Methodologically, the study illustrates the value of proposition-level source verification and paired-outlet control for distinguishing translation shifts from broader journalistic reframing.