The BBC World Service in the Middle East: Claims to impartiality,or a politics of translation?

Abstract

As the World Service’s first foray into foreign-language broadcasting (Guardian, 1938) and its first initiative to branch out into non-English-language television (1994—96; 2008 to present), BBC Arabic has played a central role for the Corporation. Distrust of its claims to impartiality, however, persists. To assess both claims and critiques, we examine its politics of translation under four headings: transporting data from the field to the broadcaster; translating from one language into another; transposing data and message by inflexions of tone; and transmitting the result to selected audiences at selected times. We do so from both an etic (‘outsiders’) analysis of BBC output and an emic (‘insiders’) analysis of what audiences perceive and react to by way of critical receptions and reactions.