Adaptation or Loss in News Translation The BBC Arabic and English Websites as an Example

Abstract

This paper deals with loss that occurs in news translation when BBC translators render a news story from Arabic into English or vice versa. It shows how some translators fail to deal with the dimension of rendering discourse as a social practice, unintentionally or even intentionally to manipulate the original relations of power and ideology implied in the source text. Light is shed on the circumstances under which the discourse is produced. The research model is highly sociological and culturist. It seeks to uncover the complex social, political, cultural and ideological forces which shape media translation practices. The population under analysis is a group of texts carefully selected to explore the qualitative aspects of the translations. The analyses are done in light of Fairclough’s approach to CDA that depends on a method of three components: that is, description, interpretation and explanation. In some cases, critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics are used together to examine translated texts and produce more general results. Analyses of texts along different periods of time prove that translating news stories on the BBC websites is for the most part a process of adaptation; editors adapt the story, whether political, scientific, sports or economic, to make it accessible to the reader. Eventually, the study recommends that there is an urgent need for building Arabic translational corpora. Such corpora are to be used with other linguistic and cultural tools within the framework of a multidisciplinary approach to get the best results for any issue in translation studies.