Uncovering Ideology in News Coverage: Ideologically Motivated Trans Editing of Hard News Reports

It is generally acknowledged that the multilingual journalistic news production involves a great deal of interlingual translation and editing, i.e. 'trans-editing', from one or more source texts into the target language.While this seems to be the common practice of multilingual news production in major news agencies, it applies to a lesser and variable extent to the BBC. By subjecting a pair of BBC English and Arabic online hard news reports, covering the same news story, and primarily based on the same source material, to critical discourse analysis, this case study will seek to shed light on the various overt and covert manifestations of their ideological and attitudinal potential, which lurks behind a veneer of 'objectivity' and 'impartiality'.The analysis will provide a glimpse of the complex axiological and ideological criteria of newsworthiness which dictate the selection and transformation of various elements in news coverage even from within the same source material. In other words, the writers and trans-editors of news reports construe for themselves particular authorial identities, constructing actual or potential audiences, with conceived values and beliefs, and adopting attitudinal stances on the events, people and situations they report on.Adopting the Appraisal Framework (Martin & White, 2005), which is based on systemic functional theory (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), as the main theoretical model for analysis, this paper explores the various lexico-grammatical manifestations of attitudinal stance and ideology in the trans editing of the so-called 'hard news' reports, with the term 'trans-editing being broadly conceived as the as the intra- or interlingual production of media texts on the basis of one or more texts.The data on which this case study is based is a pair of English and Arabic BBC online reports covering one and the same news event, namely a statement issued by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on the outcome of a preliminary examination of the 2010 Israeli raid on a Humanitarian Aid Flotilla bound for Gaza. While the English and Arabic versions do not seem to be translationally related, they are both explicitly and primarily based on the English statement of the ICC's Prosecutor.Both BBC reports will be analysed along two ideologically significant dimensions: ideation and attitudinal assessment, which reveal the rhetorical stance of the journalistic authors, and hence their ideological and attitudinal orientation as reflected in their overall selections and omissions from the source text(s) as well as their relevant linguistic choices.This study will also 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 and the so-called 'reporter voice', with its typical pattern of use and co-occurrence of evaluative meanings (Martin & White, 2005; Thomson & White, 2008).