Translating Interpersonal Meaning in Political News Discourse from English into Arabic: A Case Study of the BBC, The Guardian and Newsweek Discourse (2009-2014)

This study is broadly concerned with discourse semantic and critical discourse analysis (CDA) of interpersonal meaning in political news discourse. More specifically, it investigates the role played by engagement, graduation and invoked attitude in construing hidden ideologies in English and Anglo-American global news discourse and its Arabic translations. To achieve this objective,Martin and White‘s (2005) Appraisal framework and van Dijk‘s (1998) CDA triangle of discourse-cognition-society and his ideological square are used to analyse interpersonal meaning from the systemic functional linguistic perspective of language as a semiotic system of meaning-making choices and the critical socio-cognitive view of discourse as a social practice with its own political stance, i.e. social change or reform of unequal relations of power and dominance. This study also shares van Dijk‘s neutral view of social group ideology as axiomatic and general. A corpus of 68 authentic news and opinion texts from the BBC, The Guardian and Newsweek were analysed in this light ultimately contributing to the study of evaluation and ideology in media discourse and in translation across cultures. The combination of the appraisal toolkit as a lexicalization of the ideological square has provided insights into the role played by evaluative meaning in representing in-/out-group ideologies, and constructing and imposing realities from in-/out-group perspectives. The study‘s major contribution is to highlight the complexity of in-group vs out-group distinctions. It demonstrates that the differences between appraisals in and/or between both the original and translated texts are not only a matter of different cultural tastes as argued by a number of previous accounts; but they also reflect the more general ideological representations that are reproduced by different discourses including news discourse.