Agency, Politics, and Media Translation in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to explore the interconnection between politics, the media, and translation with particular reference to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Agency and politics play an important role in both media and translation, and this is particularly so in KSA. For geopolitical reasons, KSA realized it had to be media proactive to foster its emerging regional and global position. Political discourse through the media is a complex phenomenon; it is an institutional discourse that is also a media discourse, but mediated politics. In KSA, newspapers still dominate the circulation of political discourse, including its translation. To this end, six political texts from two different newspapers, Aljazira (in Arabic) and the Saudi Gazette (in English), are analyzed according to the direct and oblique translation methods and their associated strategies as proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet (1995). The chosen texts deal with both local and international issues concerning KSA, and are translated by the two newspapers. The analysis indicates that translation from Arabic into English seems to use the two methods and their strategies more than translation from English into Arabic. This is perhaps due to the constraints of the cultural context on the translation of political discourse in KSA.