Ideology and Translating Human Rights News: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Cases of Three Saudi Activists

Human rights discourse is an under-researched topic in translation studies, especially in the Arab World. Since the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, human rights discourse has gained great momentum.

This study deals with the effect of ideology on the cross-linguistic representations between Arabic and English of human rights discourse in the news in the context of Saudi Arabia’s domestic political and ideological conflict. It uses a modified model of critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a methodological framework to study the manipulation shifts in translations and the implications of news translation in the light of ideological influence. It employs news reports from two news agencies with different ideological orientations as its data source, namely: Al Arabiya (from Saudi Arabia); and Al-Alam (from Iran). The selected data includes news reports both in Arabic and English on the stories of three Saudi activists from the year 2011 to 2017.

The study covers the question of ideological influence by applying different levels of analysis: the translation shifts and editing that occur at the level of lexis and visual semiotics; the historical, social and political contexts; and the discursive strategies. This research has compared and analysed human rights news reports between English and Arabic and concluded that news reporting differs based on the ideological and linguistic dimensions.