To translate or to subvert ? : translating politically sensitive texts in the Palestinian context

Abstract EN

The study investigates translation in politically sensitive contexts.

It explores the transference of staged expository narrative discourse from English into Arabic in the Palestinian context.

The researchers selected a news report from the Jerusalem Post that about the Israeli incursion into Gaza in 2006.

The news report was given as a translation assignment to fifteen Palestinian students enrolled in the MA Program of Applied Linguistics and Translation at An-Najah University with the assumption that the translated report is to appear in Al-Quds newspaper.

The results of the study show that the majority of the translators resorted to dynamic renderings of the ST due to the high political sensitivity of the context that marks the news text.

Faithfulness became irrelevant and the reality and truth of the ST were questioned and often subverted in the translation.

The paper describes the nature and degree of translator interventions and outlines the strategies used to neutralize the ideological load invested in the original text.