Stance and Manipulation in Asharq Al-Awsat News Coverage of the Gulf Crisis

This thesis examines the manipulation of news report narratives and their translation in the context of political conflict, with a particular focus on the analysis of Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper and its coverage of the first six months of the blockade of Qatar (June-November 2017). The research focuses on manipulating the conflict in order to emphasize the political position of the newspaper against Qatar, through manipulating the Arabic source articles, leading to the manipulation in transferring content information to the English target culture. The extent of manipulating reality between two cultures, with the aim of shaping stance, is investigated in terms of linguistic and rhetorical features, in order to reveal stance markers used in both languages. The main models used in the analysis are Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) by Van Dijk (1997, 1998) , Baker’s Narrative Theory (2006) and Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005; White 2015). The methodology adopted is a corpus-based analysis, through a bilingual parallel corpus, facilitating a qualitative analysis of manipulation in source text, and allowing the comparison of source text and target text in terms of manipulation in translating facts. The research suggests that the English version appears to advance the position of the newspaper more cautiously and softly than the Arabic version, with the aim of emphasizing the stance of the blockading countries against Qatar to the English readership. The findings indicate that the manipulation of the narratives in the target text is a direct result of the practice adapted in the source text, with additional features such as tenacity, exaggeration, and pronouncement.