Ideologically Motivated Interventions in Arabic Translation: Thomas Friedman in 'Asharq Al-Awsat' Newspaper

This study attempts to investigate ideologically motivated interventions in news translation. The study is based on analyzing a compiled corpus of Thomas Friedman's articles in the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat Newspaper through conducting a comparison between Thomas Friedman's articles published in New York Times and the translation of those articles in Asharq Al-Awsat. In total, 45 articles were published during the selected time period from 1st January 2012 till 31st December 2014. To accomplish the target of this study, researcher applies qualitative and quantitative approaches. More specifically, a comparison was made between the source text and target text to identify the differences through the whole corpus by counting the number of shifts: omission, addition and modification. The study applies the Appraisal Framework developed by Martin and White (2005) to analyze the identified shifts that indicate the possible ideologically motivated interventions by Asharq Al-Awsat Newspaper. While the applied Model was able to analyze the most of the problematic issues, there were other shifts that could not be classified as ideological ones through applying this framework. The analysis of the data reveals that there were interventions in the translations of Thomas Friedman's work in Asharq Al-Awsat which might be politically and ideologically driven. Therefore, this study will have both theoretical and practical implications and will enhance the translation process.