Arabic Newspapers Research Articles

Gender representation and stereotyping in Moroccan print media coverage of the 2023 Haouz Earthquake

ABSTRACT Natural crises often amplify and reflect preexisting societal inequalities, with varying impacts on women across different regions. This research paper examines gender representation in the visual coverage of the 2023 Haouz earthquake. Data was collected from images published in Morocco's leading Arabic newspapers – Assabah, Bayanalyawm, and Alayam. The study analyzes how these visuals frame gender and argues that they reinforce existing gender stereotypes and cultural norms in Moroccan society. The coverage often portrayed women in limited, gender-specific roles, depicting them primarily as helpless victims. While this approach elicited sympathy from readers and donors, motivating immediate support for those affected, it may also have exploited the politics of sympathy, inadvertently perpetuating gender stereotypes.

Amina: an Arabic multi-purpose integral news articles dataset

AbstractElectronic newspapers are one of the most common sources of Modern Standard Arabic. Existing datasets of Arabic news articles typically provide a title, body, and single label. Ignoring important features, like the article author, image, tags, and publication date, can degrade the efficacy of classification models. In this paper, we propose the Arabic multi-purpose integral news articles (AMINA) dataset. AMINA is a large-scale Arabic news corpus with over 1,850,000 articles collected from 9 Arabic newspapers from different countries. It includes all the article features: title, tags, publication date and time, location, author, article image and its caption, and the number of visits. To test the efficacy of the proposed dataset, three tasks were developed and validated: article textual content (classification and generation) and article image classification. For content classification, we experimented the performance of several state-of-the-art Arabic NLP models including AraBERT and CAMeL-BERT, etc. For content generation, the reformer architecture is adopted as a character text generation model. For image classification applied on Al-Sharq and Youm7 news portals, we have compared the performance of 10 pre-trained models including ConvNeXt, MaxViT, ResNet18, etc. The overall study verifies the significance and contribution of our newly introduced Arabic articles dataset. The AMINA dataset has been released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/MohamedZayton/AMINA.

The construction of stance in English and Arabic newspaper editorials: a case study

This study explores the construction of authorial stance in English and Arabic newspaper editorials. To achieve this objective, the study examines a corpus of 80 newspaper editorials retrieved from two newspapers: The first publishes in English (The Guardian, the UK), and the second publishes in Arabic (Addustour, Jordan). The study adopts Hyland’s taxonomy of stance, which includes features of hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mentions. To analyse the data, the study follows a mixed-methods approach to identify differences, if any, in the construction of authorial stance in the two languages in the editorial genre. A functional analysis is carried out to capture these markers within contexts. The results reveal that the most frequently used stance devices in Arabic editorials are the attitude markers, followed by boosters, hedges and self-mentions. Contrariwise, the findings showcase that the most frequently used stance device is hedging, followed by attitude markers, boosters, and self-mention. The study concludes that the two languages differ in the way they construct stance in editorials, a conclusion that provides implications for second-language professional writing teachers and students. The findings provide insights that might enhance the skills of argumentative writing in English for media courses.

Manipulating English news reports translated into Arabic: the influence of patronage and socio-narratives

ABSTRACT The influence of patronage and socio-narratives on the process and product of translation is examined, focusing on the implications of these social phenomena on the translation of current affairs in the Arab world. The translation of English news articles in Arabic newspapers is analysed to see whether the linguistic structures and strategies employed by the source and target newspapers in news reporting are doctored for communication flow or rather censored to serve the patrons’ goals and political agendas. It is suggested that the main objective in translating news articles into Arabic is not to achieve linguistic equivalence in all cases, but rather to naturalize the message in the communication process or employ censorship in order to fulfil the needs and political agenda of the ‘patrons’. The selected translated news, from two popular Arabic newspapers, the Egyptian Al-Ahram and the Syrian Tishreen, feature various manipulative strategies that shift perspectives and justify the repressive measures and policies of the Arab patrons.

Religion, Race, and Letterpress: Orthodox Christians in Nineteenth-Century New York City through the Lens of Kawkab America

Abstract Kawkab America (Star of America) is the first Arabic-language newspaper in America, published in New York City from 1892 to 1908. Founded by Orthodox Christians from Ottoman Syria, the newspaper reported on historical and contemporary events across the globe. In this article, I analyze the representations of religion in Kawkab to reconstruct the ways a Middle Eastern immigrant community perceived religious diversity in nineteenth-century America. Kawkab engaged the contemporary discourses about “world religions” by expanding this category’s boundaries. And by downplaying the theological distinctions between Christian denominations, it represented Syrians as members of an ecumenical Christianity. To further reinforce the value of the Orthodox community as worthy American subjects, the newspaper also commented on morality and piety as universal, cross-confessional norms, which Syrians abided by and guarded. Kawkab’s use of these literary strategies testifies to Syrian Christians’ negotiation of religion, race, and culture in a transnational, diasporic space.

The Metadiscursive Construction of Computer-mediated Discourse in Arabic Newspaper Articles

The Metadiscursive Construction of Computer-mediated Discourse in Arabic Newspaper Articles

The Emergence of the Term “Conspiracy” in the Arabic Public Sphere

Abstract Conspiracy theories are widespread across the world, including in the Arab Middle East and North Africa. The term “conspiracy” (muˀāmara) itself is also frequently used in contemporary Arabic. However, we know little about when and how the term emerged and how it was used originally. Based on a digital corpus of Arab newspapers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as plain text versions of classical Arabic literature, this article finds that muˀāmara appears and rises to prominence in the late nineteenth century in the emerging Arabic-speaking public sphere. The term was probably coined in response to influence from European public discourse at the same time, which included conspiracy theories. Unlike that European discourse and today's Arabic conspiracy talk, the early usage of muˀāmara had little to do with either conspiracy theories or religion. The word was used in a more sober way than in Europe.

Grammatical Cohesion in English and Arabic Business Texts: A Contrastive Discoursal Analysis

The current study centres around uncovering the functions and types of grammatical cohesion in structuring business texts in English and Arabic newspapers. Unequivocally, it aims to unravel the possible similarities and differences in the English and Arab journalistic registers in terms of grammatical cohesion. Moreover, the study is built on two hypotheses. First, there are differences in the frequencies of grammatical cohesive tools manipulated by English and Arabic writers. Unlike their Arabic counterparts, the English articles tend to involve more realizations of grammatical cohesive patterns. Second, both English and Arabic journalists exhibit a general tendency to take advantage of the same types of grammatical cohesion in their business articles. Ten articles have been selected from The Guardian and Ashareq Al-Awsat newspaper websites as data for analysis. Five articles have been picked from each newspaper. Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) model of grammatical cohesion has been applied to the selected articles in both languages. The results show that reference and conjunction exist profoundly in the two newspapers. On the contrary, substitution and ellipsis have almost disappeared in both corpora.

British Photographic Propaganda in World War II

The study of an Arabic newspaper published by the British during World War II shows how photographs played an important role in the propaganda campaign to gain Arab support in the Middle East. While the newspaper purported to cover the war, in actuality, the content contained mostly cultural photographs that contributed to the Allies’ implementation of psychological warfare, particularly emphasizing Arab identity, lifestyle in England, development in the Arab World, and the solid Arab–Allies relationship. The results of this study demonstrate how photographs played an important role in the propaganda machine, which, in this case, was intended to positively impress Arabs and Muslims in the Arabian Peninsula and turn them against the Axis.

No smiling for Algerian workers: explaining the modest harvest of the labour movement during the Hirak

Between March 2019 and October 2021, Algerian workers staged no fewer than 214 strikes, playing a vital role in the fall of former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and continuing to mobilise in the aftermath. Yet, they have gained little. This article constructs an innovative dataset on strikes in Algeria, which draws on both French-language and Arabic newspapers, to explain why workers have achieved only modest gains. It does so by pointing to three crucial factors: the separation between the ‘economic’ and ‘political’ wings of the protest movement; the division between workers in the private and public sectors; and the split between the former sole trade union in the country and the autonomous unions.

Headlines and Hegemony: Unraveling Ideological Narratives in Arab and Western Media's Portrayal of Arab Women

This study investigates the ideologies and strategies used in the news discourse on Arab women. Initially, it aims to analyze the macro strategies and then highlights the micro strategies used to achieve the macro strategies proposed by van Dijk. It also identifies the ideologies of the selected newspapers regarding Arab women. Four newspapers were selected: the Washington Post, Daily Mail, Arab newspaper, and Gulf Times. The findings reveal that the selected newspapers employed four macro-strategies. It was also found that the selected newspapers employed ten micro strategies to achieve the four macro strategies. More importantly, the analysis showed that the selected newspapers had different ideologies. For instance, the ideologies of Arab newspapers include defending the stand of Arab regimes and Islam regarding women’s rights. However, the ideologies embraced by Western newspapers encompass the promotion of Arab women's advocacy for enhanced rights, urging Western authorities to impose sanctions on Arab nations that do not uphold women's rights and advocate for their governments to sever diplomatic ties with countries that fail to ensure adequate rights for women.

The Translatability of Sports Metaphors in Political News

The present study investigates the difficulties and problems in deciphering the figurative meaning of English sports metaphors that appear in political news and, more specifically, in US presidential campaigns and their Arabic equivalents when they are under the detailed scrutiny of translation. In order to highlight the problem under discussion, the study explores the translation of some sports metaphors in their original context of use. Several English sports metaphors from different sports fields are collected randomly from British and US online newspapers with their possible equivalents in Arabic that are used in comparable texts that report the same topic. This comparative study focuses on the different strategies that are followed in rendering English sports metaphors in Arabic online newspapers. The researcher employed an empirical, descriptive and analytical approach where sports metaphors are described and classified. Their translations on online Arabic newspapers are also discussed and examined. The analysis will be based on the conceptual metaphor framework proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1984). Thus, it will be important to assess the conceptualized experiences across different cultures, particularly between English and Arabic, in this study. The findings reveal that English sports metaphors pose a metaphorical and cultural threat to the Arab translator, who might be tempted to translate them literally in case s/he fails to understand their hidden meaning. Producing accurate translation equivalents for these items cannot be achieved without knowing their metaphorical senses and the ability to provide natural and acceptable equivalents in the target language. The aim is to create a similar impact on the target language audience.

Frame your friends close and your enemies closer: how al-Masra newspaper imagines individuals

ABSTRACT Armed groups are well-known for discussing their allies and adversaries in unitary actor terms. However, individuals also play an important part in the discourse of armed groups. Focusing on jihadist propaganda, we adopt a multi-method approach to examine the influence of individuals on militants’ diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing. We do so by analyzing original data collected from 1250 articles in al-Masra, an Arabic language newspaper linked to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Quantitatively, we record the number of articles in which numerous jihadist figures and leaders from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the United States were mentioned to measure their significance in al-Masra’s contents. Qualitatively, we explore al-Masra’s discourse surrounding these different individuals. Rather than only framing friends and foes in unitary actor terms, we find that individuals played a central role in al-Masra’s framing efforts. Yet, the extent to which al-Masra discussed different personalities varied across organizations as well as countries. These findings contribute to scholarship on individuals in conflict processes, armed group framing strategies, and jihadist propaganda.

Genre–Linguistic Analysis of Errata Texts in Arabic

News accuracy has been a significant issue for media organizations. However, Arabic errata texts have been neglected in academic research. The purpose of the present study is to identify the generic structural components of errata published in three different types of Arabic texts. We attempt to analyse the generic structure of these texts and determine the linguistic signals used to indicate these components. The paper also sheds light on the different kinds of errors found in Arabic texts and the functions they communicate to readers. For this, we collected and analysed 120 errata from Arabic daily newspapers, academic journals, and popular magazines. For our data analysis, we drew on the genre analysis framework pioneered by Swales (1990) and further adapted by other researchers such as Al-Ali (2005). We additionally referred to Bugeja and Peterson (2007) for classifying the types of errors. The study results show that the analysed Arabic errata texts followed a generic structure comprising eight component moves. Further, objective errors were found to be more frequent than subjective errors in Arabic newspapers and academic journals. We hope that similar future studies further the current understanding of genre identification and construction, especially in Arabic errata texts.

A corpus-based Analysis of Adjective Patterns in English and Arabic Newspapers from a Cognitive Perspective

A corpus-based Analysis of Adjective Patterns in English and Arabic Newspapers from a Cognitive Perspective

Pragmatic Structure of Implicature and Violation of Grice Maxims in Some English and Arabic Newspapers

This paper is an attempt to study gossip in two Newspapers. It pragmatically tackles gossip in these mass media. Consequently, it attempts to achieve the following aims:1) examining to what extent Grecian pragmatic theory of cooperative principle is of any help for revealing the intended meaning of media gossips in the selected newspapers.2) identifying the pragmatic structure of implicature in which gossip is composed. To Fulfill the aims of this study, it is hypothesized that: 1) Pragmatic principles occur randomly in English and Arabic media gossips.2) The gossip columns (the data of the current work) in the six newspapers under investigation are analyzed according to the models (Violation of Grice Maxims and implicature) . 3)Carrying out a contrastive analysis of the ways of expressing gossip in both languages.4) Drawing conclusions from the results of the study and making some recommendations and suggestions for further study.

The Soviet East European Policy in the Arabic Press on the Eve of the World War II (August — December 1939)

This paper analyzes Arabic newspaper and magazine publications devoted to the assessment of the USSR foreign policy towards the East European countries after the signing of the Soviet-German non-aggression treaty of August 23, 1939. The article presents the opinions of Arab journalists and writers about the prerequisites and consequences of the signing of the so-called «Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact», the peculiarities of relations between Moscow and Berlin in the end of 1939, the reasons for the invasion of the Red Army in Poland, as well as the motives that prompted the Soviet leadership to strengthen its presence in the Baltic region. It is concluded that many authoritative Arabic newspapers and magazines, despite a dependence on the Western European information agenda, sought to independently comprehend the actions of the Soviet government in different parts of Europe, sometimes even emphasizing the forced nature of an aggressive and ultimatum policy. At the same time, it is impossible to talk about the existence of a dominant position on this problem. Arab authors frequently criticized the military and political actions of the Soviet government in the autumn-winter of 1939. It should be added that the volume and number of articles published in the press testify to the true interest of the Middle Eastern publics in the state of affairs in the distant Soviet Union.

Engagement strategies in English and Arabic newspaper editorials

This study explores the use and functions of engagement strategies in English and Arabic newspaper editorials. To this end, the study analyses 80 editorials collected from two popular newspapers (40 from each): The Guardian which publishes in English and appears in the UK and Addustour which publishes in Arabic and appears in Jordan. Following Paltridge’s (2020) taxonomy, the study utilises a mixed-method approach to assess whether differences in the use of engagement strategies between the two corpora are statistically significant and to identify the functions of the strategies used in the two sets of data. The findings show that there are statistically significant differences between the two languages in the use of some engagement strategies. In particular, Arabic editorials included more reader pronouns and less personal asides than did English ones. In addition, although questioning as an engagement strategy was absent in the Arabic corpus, it was used in the English one to transmit information and circulate knowledge. The findings enrich our understanding of how the editorial genre is constructed, and how editorialists engage with their readers in the two languages.

International and Arab international newspapers’ websites coverage of the Corona pandemic crisis (Covid-19) Analytical study for the website of my newspapers (The Washington Post and the Middle East) for the period from 1/5/2020 to 1/5/2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected communities and people in general and has not excluded anyone. It created multiple crises of political, economic, Almay, social and finally education, and received extensive media coverage. Local, international and international in all its forms, whether traditional, digital or electronic, the research study therefore focused on the need to clarify the relationship between the websites of the worlds and Arab international newspapers in covering the most important global event that has swept the world and imposed its control over all spheres of life. The selection of websites for international and Arab newspapers and their role in covering the internal and external crises experienced by most countries was based on their importance and prominent role in performing media tasks. From the beginning to the moment, especially after the digital transformation that reflected on the performance of the press organization positively, the coverage of the corona virus crisis must be identified by those newspapers. As a result of the huge number of variables and rapid events associated with the pandemic around the world, the process of preparing and preparing news has become a complex industry. That she went beyond the usual description of events, so that she had her own means and methods and philosophy, and no longer just a description of a real-time event of interest, but a window that overlooked each of them to employ their own trends. Given the serious problems posed by this topic that may adversely affect societies in the future and lead to global collapses, The facts must be reached through the media and only through which the public can get news and information. All of this therefore raised questions about the research problem developed by the researcher as follows: - What are the substantive limits on the coverage of the coronavirus pandemic? Was the pandemic a priority for newspapers and their websites, or are there priorities for other issues? The research consists of an introduction, three investigations and a conclusion. The first research examined the methodological framework of the research. The second research touched on the theoretical aspect of the research, which was devoted to describing the pandemic and the websites of newspapers and inquiries used by newspapers during the coverage. The third research analysed the news coverage in the Washington Post and Middle East electronic newspapers of the crisis. Finally, reference was made to the researcher's main findings and recommendations through research data.

Code mixing and code switching in the advertisements published in Arabic newspapers

This study has analyzed code mixing and code switching in the advertisements published in Arabic newspapers. It has investigated the frequency and borrowing of English language words in the Arabic advertisements. This is a corpus based research, in which different stages are involved: compiling a corpus, designing a corpus, text collection and processing, analyzing a corpus. This approach also depends on both qualitative and quantitative methods in this study. To meet the requirements of the first research questions, quantitative data was required and for that purpose, corpus based quantitative research was carried out. Furthermore, for investigating the features of borrowed words, qualitative method was used. The sub type of non-probability sampling; purposive sampling technique was used for this study. The sample size of this study was 20 advertisements published in the Arabic newspapers of Arab countries. This corpus was developed by the text gathered from random samples of advertisements in Arabic newspapers (Al-Ahram and Al-Rai). The AntConc (Anthony, 2005) software tool is used for investigating the frequency of code switching and code mixing occurred and the processes that were being caused of code mixing and code switching in the selected advertisements.