Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2012

This paper argues for closer interdisciplinarity between critical discourse analysis (CDA) and translation studies (TS). There has been very little CDA investigating discursive representations by news organisations across linguistic, political and cultural boundaries. Similarly researchers in TS have pointed out that the sensitive role news translation plays in discursive phenomena such as globalisation and political discourse remains largely underestimated. To address this gap, three methodological models are proposed for linking the dialectical-relational approach to CDA (Fairclough 1992, 1995, 2003) with text-based approaches in TS. A mini-case study will illustrate such links by analysing talks by Saudi women translated by BBC News into Standard Arabic and English. Findings reveal substantial transformations which cannot be dismissed as inevitable constraints of the news genre or translation, but are more likely to reflect prevailing narratives of Muslim women being ‘submissive’ and ‘oppressed’.

Voice-overs with muted images, often known as the “image bite,” have become an increasingly used but understudied format of political language by the television news media. Because the media can use images to fit many contexts and purposes of commentary, the media images are susceptible to continuous de-contextualization and re-contextualization. Drawing from theories of feminist critical discourse analysis and gender performance as well as scholarship on the public/private divide, we examine the commentary of one U.S. television news organization’s (NBC) re-contextualization of the same stock footage of Hillary Clinton over 10 newscasts spanning 20 months from August 1998 to June of 2000. NBC re-enforces the public/private binary in conventional masculine terms. Yet it also worked, at times, to unify the binary when covering Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaign; on those occasions at least, NBC revealed the potential erosion of gender stereotypes and a small but still significant role for human agency in the study of gender ideology.

This article combines methodology from the discourse-historical approach with critique from Indigenous feminism and postcolonial theory to examine the “update” feature of Internet news and its potential impact on knowledge. The notion of text becomes abstract as authors produce neo-texts labeled “updated,” leading to opacity in editorial processing. From a case study analyzing an Associated Press article discussing Pakistani responses to U.S. drone attacks, we observe negative (re)presentation of Indigenous peoples in Pakistan as authors use rhetorical strategies to achieve erasure in subsequent revisions. I interpret the authors as employing such strategies to legitimize United States’ power under the axiological guise of protecting “democracy.” The revisions silence tribal leaders’ and women’s voices, substituting elements that interdiscursively appeal to “terrorism” in a post-9/11 context. The authors dissolve the distinction between tribal peoples in Pakistan and “terrorists.” U.S. military aggression is linguistically realized as defensive, and Pakistani disapprobation framed as offensive attack.

The article analyses how the Mohammad cartoons enforced stereotypes of Muslims. It provides in-depth analysis of the cartoons based on opinion material from public debate and cognitive discourse analysis of “common sense knowledge”. The article shows that the main themes of interpretation were Muslim male and female identities. These were presented in a stereotypical way, downplaying agency and critical reflection among Muslim believers. Moreover, many citizens pointed out similarities between the Abrahamic religions. Such interpretations may be traced to mental models that perceived the cartoons as either humorous, a matter of Freedom of speech, or as an expression of values supportive to multiculturalism. Thereby the public debate drew on discourses about terrorism, veiling, child marriages, mother tongue education, and Turkey’s possible EU-accession. In general, the cartoons as well as the public debate about them enforced new racist ideas of Muslims.

This article critically studies documentaries focusing on the “Islamic terrorist threat”, produced in the US and in Western Europe. The particular films relate to the discourses of the growing far right political movements in liberal democracies. The article analyzes the communicational tactics deployed by the filmmakers for counter-terrorist mobilization of “Westerners”. The films’ producers objectify the terrorist threat as exceptional and ontological, in order to reconfigure the identity of the “West”. The analysis focuses on representations of the West’s threatening Other through the reflexive use of critical discourse analysis and post structuralist, discourse theory. Counter-threat strategies, varying from warfare to biopolitical control, are articulated as social demands and as individualized tasks of inclusion to the ideological space of the West and the sovereign space of western nation states. The critical study of the particular documentaries aims at highlighting the regressive and character of the passionate discourses of far right media, in relation to the political crisis that liberal democracies across the world are facing.

The aim of this paper is to examine the evolving Israeli discourse of recognition of the Palestinian people and their suffering as a case study for theorizing the role of recognition statements in peace processes. Three stages of recognition are characterized and applied in order to understand the changing attitudes of Israeli officials toward the Palestinians: (1) acknowledgment of a political entity; (2) acknowledgment of their suffering; (3) acknowledgment of responsibility for their suffering. An analysis of Israeli officials’ statements allows one to track the evolving recognition of one side in a conflict vis-à-vis the suffering of the other. Further, analysis of the response in Israel, in Palestinian territories and in the Arab world to what is considered the most far-reaching recognition statement made by an Israeli official enables us better to understand the role of such statements in promoting reconciliation.

In 2000 the leftist camp in Israel experienced a crisis of meaning and identity. This was the result of the failure of the 2000 Camp David Talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The atmosphere that emerged amongst the Israeli left was one of despair and disillusion, a void of meaning. Recently, however, a new Zionist “national left” discourse emerged, which refutes the idea of peace and reconstructs the ideology of the Israeli left. This paper engages critically with this discourse by deploying a discourse analytical approach, as it draws on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of hegemony as well as semantic analysis, specifically the use of “semantic fields” and “semantic networks”. This paper looks at a variety of public texts, which are exemplary of the “national left” discourse in Israel.