ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses media translation or trans-editing, broadly conceived as the intra- or interlingual production by journalistic authors of media texts on the basis of one or more source texts. Analysis of news stories reported by the media generally reveals the operation of complex axiological and ideological criteria for selection and transformation. These complex criteria of newsworthiness, or ‘news values’, are said to perform a ‘gate-keeping’ role, filtering and restricting news output (Fowler, 1991). The writers of news reports construe for themselves particular authorial identities, constructing actual or potential audiences, with conceived values and beliefs, and adopting attitudinal positions and evaluative stances vis-à-vis the events, people and situations they report on.
Adopting the appraisal framework (Martin and White, 2005) as the main theoretical model for discourse analysis, this case study analyses a pair of English and Arabic BBC online hard news reports covering the same news story, and drawing on the same Arabic primary source for their factual content. The purpose of this analysis is twofold: first to demonstrate that both reports, in terms of their textual architecture and the patterns of key evaluative meanings they deploy, belong to the ‘hard news report’ genre with its typical pattern of evaluative meanings. Yet this chapter also seeks to demonstrate how the two reports function ideologically and evaluatively in two opposing directions, while maintaining a façade of neutrality, detachment and objectivity.
The chapter will argue that the observed divergences between the two BBC language versions of the news story in question, compared with the identified source text on which they are factually based, cannot be simply explained away by some requirements of cultural transfer or the need to be congenial to their respective audiences, but rather by different ideological and evaluative orientations on the part of their journalistic authors.
