Translation shifts in aljazeera and BBC translations of obama’s speech on the Arab spring

Media translation is among the subfields of translation studies that has grown in the last two decades, especially the translation of political discourse. However, there are scarce studies on tendencies or policies of international media agencies in terms of translator’s behaviour and the nature of the translated texts. The current study seeks to analyse and contrast the Arabic translations of Obama’s speech on Arab Spring delivered at the Department of State in 2011 which was translated by Aljazeera and BBC Arabic satellite television channels. For this purpose, four translation models; Molina and Albir (2002), Schjoldager (2008), Dukāte (2009) and Darwish (2010) were employed to detect and analyse translation shifts exercised by these two channels. The qualitative content analysis was adopted, where each translation was contrasted to the original English text so that translation shifts can be identified. The coding of the translations of Aljazeera and BBC was performed through a special application added to the Microsoft Office Word 2016. The study found that translation shifts were a priority for both media channels. In other words, literal translation was avoided to a great extent and such shifts might be attributable, sometimes, to syntactic and semantic constraints (obligatory shifts) triggered by linguistic and cultural differences between Arabic and English. However, optional shifts were noted in greater rates in both Aljazeera and BBC. In terms of differences, there was no significant variation between Aljazeera and BBC in the rates of using obligatory and optional shifts which indicates that the translation policy in both international news agencies prioritise translator’s fidelity to the editorial policy of the media agency in order to meet the expectations of target audience on the expense of faithfulness to the original text despite the fact each channel has its own ideology and media discourse.

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