Translation and public opinion: The press in Jordan

My thesis explores the reflexive and constructive roles of translation in the press, epitomized through studying translation in the press in Jordan since 1989, a year marked for democratization in Jordan. The body of translated texts, mainly 'meta-news' as exhibited in the Jordanian newspapers constitutes defined political 'discourse' that is designed to form particular collective identities and institutional effects perpetuated through regulated discursive strategies. As an ideological apparatus, the media system responds to and reflects its environment. In Jordan's quasi-democratic political environment and under the weak economic infrastructure of the press, articles imported from foreign media constitute a pivotal medium for regulating access to information and harnessing the process of opinion-formation. Most specifically, translation contributes to moulding and maintaining a more balanced 'glocalized' viewpoint of world events, a liaison and compromise to the tension between the dominant Western media discourse and the domestic value systems. This mediated 'in-between' alterity enables the press to accelerate social development through negotiating public agendas and setting platforms for dialogue and debate in the public sphere. Strategies of text selection and exclusion are determined by journalistic news values as well as by domestic ideological frameworks. Examination of the dynamics of translation behaviour in the press raises fundamental questions concerning the dialectical relationship involving the media institution, the translator, and the audience. Within a marketing perspective in modern press institutions, the implicit notions that translators form of the audience as a collective entity, are emphasized as key factors that affect the logistics of text production and translation decisions. The translator in the media setting sees her/himself as a prototypical representative of the community s/he belongs to. Studying the complex impact of geopolitical, macro-economic, demographic and socio-cultural forces on translation strategies can help anchor a more profound understanding of the nature of both the media outcome and readership. Finally, the corpus of the press emerges as a rich ground for multi-layered scholarly research that incorporates journalistic values and ethics---that are exclusively pertinent to the print media---into Translation Studies.