Staff in the Department of Arabic
Publication details for Dr Khaled Al-Shehari
2007 Al-Shehari, Khaled 'Semiotics and the Translation of News Headlines: Making an Image of the Other', Translation Studies in the New Millennium 5, pp. 1-12- Publication type: Journal papers: academic
- ISSN/ISBN: 1304-2688
- Keywords: Aljazeera, news headlines, semiotics, Arabic, Yemen
Author(s) from Durham
Abstract
This paper aims to explore how certain ideologies can be signaled through the translation of news headlines. The main objective is to investigate the strategies used by an international Arab news producer (Aljazeera.net) to translate into English news stories published originally in Arabic on its website. Given that readers of the target texts have different ideologies and expectations from those of the source texts’ readers, news stories will more than likely go through some modifications when translated. Publishers of news also have ideological attitudes that can be expressed through the production and translation of news stories.
The paper introduces semiotics as a tool of analysis through some key notions such as signification, myth, and syntagms and paradigms, and shows how these notions can help uncover the hidden and ideologically-motivated meanings of any particular text. A thorough analysis is then applied to a corpus collected from aljazeera.net, which comprises news headlines published in Arabic about Yemen during 2005 along with their English versions. During the year 2005, Yemen witnessed the occurrence of a number of events that had a significant influence on its political history. This paper attempts to demonstrate how an image of Yemen is introduced via mass media and how such an image is transferred to the speakers of English via translation.