'Transediting’ Saudi Arabia by the BBC: a corpus-driven critical discourse analysis study of representations and power negotiation, 2013–2015

Abstract

Translators in newsrooms routinely apply what Bielsa and Bassnett (2009, p.10) refer to as ‘absolute domestication’ in which the source text (ST) is ‘transedited’ (Stetting, 1989, pp.371-82). This can lead to power ‘abuse’ and ‘ethnocentric violence’ against the ST, language and culture (Venuti, 1995). By incorporating corpus tools and critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Wodak and Meyer, 2016), this research investigates, first, the key themes that the BBC Monitoring Middle East (BBCM-M) service tended to focus on when reporting on Saudi Arabia from Arabic news output from 2013 to 2015 in relation to other British news sources reporting in English, second, the representations of Saudi Arabia disseminated by the BBCM-M and the extent to which it contributed to such representations and, third, the power dynamics between the Arabic source and English target texts through transediting.
The study reveals three key themes that characterise the BBCM-M’s coverage of Saudi Arabia: identity, action and status and relations. There are four main representations of Saudi Arabia: 1) as filled with men of authority, who are unlike women, with real agency, 2) its rivalry with Iran and reliance on the US, 3) its three-dimensional image in relation to terrorism and 4) its paradoxical portrayal in relation to: power, policies and development. Importantly, these are ‘anchored’ to stereotypical ‘social representations’ (Moscovici, 2000) that fit into the ‘system of representations’ of Arabs and Muslims in Western media and literature (Said, 1978). The study also exposes a power imbalance in favour of English both prior to and during the ‘transediting’ process, which enabled the active contributions of BBCM M professionals to these representations. This research demonstrates how translation in a cross-cultural context such as news translation can be an apparatus of ‘coloniality of power and knowledge’ (Quijano, 2000). It also shows how a certain ‘system of representations’ can be sustained across time, languages and cultures via the constant reproduction of certain images that ‘anchor’ the same ‘social representations’ that exist in that system.