Biased Unbiased Translation: The Case of English into Arabic Translation

Abstract

The present paper examines two notions in the ideology of translation, namely biased and unbiased tones as can be illustrated in 10 examples taken from BBC website along with their translations into Arabic by BBC Arabic in 2018 and 2019. The paper first argues that BBC bulging with news items and their translations provided by BBC Arabic should have the same inherent qualities like reciprocal biased and/or unbiased tone as both channels presumably advocate the same general policy. Contrary to this initial assumption, the paper shows that a biased-Source Language (SL) item may have an unbiased-Target Language (TL) text (i.e., translation) or unbiased SL text might have a biased and/or unbiased translation, mainly for two reasons: (1) audience-oriented translation in which the lexical choices made in translation do not occur in a vacuum, but are often influenced by an ideology tilting towards the expectations of a specific audience; and (2) linguistic aspects whereby the two languages, i.e. English and Arabic have little linguistic reality.