Media events and translation: The case of the Arab Spring

Abstract

This article contributes to the growing research on transnational and global media events by focusing on the role of translation in the process of mediated meaning-making of the so-called Arab Spring. Furthermore, the article focuses on the role of traditional media channels (television), and questions conflation of the Arab Spring and the Arab world. Therefore, a database was created of the English television coverage on Egypt’s and Syria’s uprisings done by ‘Russia Today’ and ‘Al Jazeera’. The coverage was analysed using narrative and discourse analysis focusing on the role of media reports translation. This analysis included different translations and also considered the impact of these translations on the overall framing of the media event. It demonstrated how translation positioned the narrative structure of media events and their internal dynamic; how these dynamics were reconfigured through recontextualization; how participants were repositioned; and how the competition impacted the further dynamics of the media event.