Copyright © 2005 Ali Darwish. All Rights Reserved.

Despite the crucial role translation plays in framing domestic and international news, a survey of more that 370 codes of ethics and codes of practice adopted by different media outlets around the world shows a serious lack of attention to translation. With the exception of the code of ethics adopted by the Press Foundation of Asia, enshrined in the Principles on Reporting Ethnic Tensions, which evolved from a nine-nation journalism conference held in Davao City (in the Philippines) in April 1970, none of the surveyed codes mention translation as a principal factor in ensuring accuracy and objectivity, and none of the United Nations fifty-one founding member states cite translation in the codes of ethics of their media and journalism associations, accessed during this survey.

Furthermore, neither “translation” nor “language” (except occasionally) is entertained in the codes of ethics of journalism and media associations and institutions in advanced first world countries, such as Australia, Britain, France, Germany, USA, and Canada, which boast ethnically, culturally and/or linguistically diverse communities. 

In Australia for example, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) provides foreign language services in several community languages. These services use translations of primary English information sources in their news broadcasts and other current affairs programs. Yet while the SBS code of practice recognizes “English as the common language of Australia and therefore as a major vehicle through which SBS can promote cross-cultural awareness”, hardly any attention is given to translation as a defining factor in news production, except casually in the treatment of subtitling and voiceovers for television.

Almost all of the surveyed codes of ethics focus on ensuring: accuracy, fairness, truthfulness, objectivity and neutrality, and rehash the same principles in almost the same carbon-copy format. How can these be upheld when foreign language sources are translated? Recent world events have clearly demonstrated that such is a consistently risky undertaking fraught with problems relating to language, culture, politics, editorial policy, and ideology, among other things. 

Generally, foreign information sources, especially translations (probably with the exception of direct quotes and statements) are usually used as raw materials that are submitted to a synthesis process to produce news reports that supposedly conform to editorial policy. In most situations however, information gathered and packaged as news feeds by newswire agencies, such as Reuters, Associated Press, and AFP (Agence France-Presse), are used and reused wholesale by various news and media outfits worldwide. It is not highly unusual to come across the same news item repeated "as is" by different news and information media providers.

For most non-English news media providers, news feeds constitute the primary source of information on international and surprisingly domestic and regional events. In the Arabic media for example, foreign information sources are translated verbatim down to the sentence and phrase levels. The synthesis process in this case is largely limited to basic text rearrangement that is subject to distortion, obfuscation, and translation mediated reframing of source information. Given the poor translation skills of most journalists and translators and the lack of structured methodologies in news translation that ensure accuracy, fairness, truthfulness, objectivity and neutrality of reported news and transferred information through translated documentaries, major violations of these principles are inevitable, as clearly evidenced in this paper. 

This paper examines translation-driven framing of news in Arabic satellite television vis-à-vis international and domestic codes of ethics and codes of practice. It highlights the central role translation plays in framing and reframing news and documentaries and argues that factors such as metaphor, metonymy, euphemism, allusion and quotatives, etc, are real and potential culprits in translation-driven framing of news.