Trans-editing of Saudi-related News by the British Press: Positioning and Agency



Alsallum, Eithar
(2020) Trans-editing of Saudi-related News by the British Press: Positioning and Agency. PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.

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Abstract

Translation is usually perceived as an ‘invisible’ part of journalists’ daily routine at the foreign desks of newspapers. Despite the key socio-political role played by translation in international news production, the contributors behind this complex process have received scant attention from scholars in Translation Studies. The present research explores the role played by institutional and individual agents in positioning Saudi news in the British press through multiple processes of ‘trans-editing’, a term coined in 1989 by Stetting. The study examines three quality British newspapers—The Guardian, The Independent and The Telegraph—to investigate how their social dispositions shaped their trans-editing of Saudi-related news during a period of reform from August 2015 to July 2016. This thesis proposes a combined conceptual framework of Bourdieu’s theory of social practice and analytical tools from an appraisal framework and Pedersen’s ‘Venutian scale’ framework. The thesis investigates contributing agents within each institution (journalists) and outside institutional settings (cited Twitter users), analysing them in terms of their collective and individual forms of habitus, accumulated and exchanged forms of capital and the space to where they function, i.e. field. To support this analysis, the thesis assembled a unique dataset of English-language hard news reports taken from the three broadsheets as well as institutional documents. These were supplemented by original semi-structured interviews with the most prolific journalists. The findings generated by the analysis suggest that the collective forms of newspapers’ habitus dominate the trans-editing process over individual habituses. The authorial power of each individual journalist is associated with their positions within their parent institutions as senior journalists have more space to exhibit distinguishing trans-editing strategies compared to newcomers. The findings also reveal a common tendency towards distancing Saudi Arabia through trans-editing, but the extent to which news is domesticated or foreignised is linked to the accumulated linguistic capital of journalists. Ultimately, this study shows that the invisibility of trans-editing can be observed more in the context of translation from Arabic into English, compared to other language pairs, due to the hegemonic status of English in news reporting, which means that trans-editing from Arabic is not a field on its own, but rather an activity within the British journalistic field and therefore needs to be perceived as a social practice in the broader context of news production.

Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
Divisions: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Histories, Languages and Cultures
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 15 Jan 2021 16:55
Last Modified: 18 Jan 2023 23:32
DOI: 10.17638/03101571
Supervisors:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3101571