Manipulation of translation in hard news reporting on the Gulf crisis: combining narrative and appraisal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the manipulation of translation for propagandistic purposes in the Gulf crisis, which has led to the economic blockade of Qatar since June 2017. It focuses on Al-Ittihad , an Arabic daily newspaper owned by the United Arab Emirates. The data under analysis is extracted from a hard news daily section that Al-Ittihad has dedicated to Qatar since the outbreak of the crisis. Combining Narrative Theory with the Appraisal Framework provides an insightful account of the ideologically motivated manipulation and weaponization of news translation. Going beyond the reductive claim of domestication in News translation studies, this dual theoretical approach allows for further articulation of the socio-political context with translation strategies, by combining macro- and micro-analysis. This approach also uncovers the workings of propaganda in Al-Ittihad ’s translational news reporting. From the transediting of foreign attributions to the intersemiotic design of the newspaper’s layout, translational news reporting involves embedding personal and shared narratives into the micro- and macro-levels of the hard news section to construe a negative evaluation of Qatar. Behind a façade of detachment and neutrality, hard news reports and the translation on which they rely feed into the propagandistic discourse of hawkish parties.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".