Framing Conflict News in Transnational Media: English-Arabic Transediting/Translation as Secondary Gatekeeping and Frame Mutation

Abstract

This study reconceptualizes frame mutation in transnational political and conflict-adjacent media by modeling English-Arabic news transediting/translation as a secondary gatekeeping stage where micro-textual interventions reshape frames before they reach target publics. Using Entman’s four framing functions (problem definition, causal attribution, moral evaluation, and implied remedy) and Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Critical Discourse Model (text, discursive practice, sociocultural practice), the analysis examines a purposive micro-corpus of seven case-study published English source texts and their Arabic target versions. Source-target pairs were fully aligned into 15 sentence/clause-level segments and coded with an explicit operator codebook capturing six recurrent reframing operators: loaded terminology substitution, evaluative additions, modality/evidentiality shifts, omission/backgrounding, agency rekeying, and rhetorical modulation. To strengthen auditability in a single-analyst design, a blinded two-pass stability audit was conducted on 90 operator-cells, yielding 96.7% agreement and strong reliability (κ = 0.911; α = 0.911; PABAK = 0.933). Results show that translational media gatekeeping systematically rekeys legitimacy and responsibility patterns, with rhetorical modulation and evaluative additions that appear in most cases and lexical relabeling concentrating around conflict naming and contested toponymy. Rarer omissions and agency shifts nonetheless produced high-leverage accountability effects. The study concludes that media transediting/translation gatekeeping in multilingual news circulation is not a neutral transfer device but an embedded locus of framing power, and it demonstrates how mechanism-focused micro-corpus designs can produce disciplined, theory-relevant evidence suitable for scaling to larger multilingual datasets and production studies.