Master’s Thesis: English-Arabic Translation of Stance Markers in Political Discourse
This study examines the English–Arabic translation of stance markers in political discourse, with a specific focus on televised interviews featuring native English-speaking ambassadors and their corresponding officially published Arabic translations. While stance has been widely examined in academic, journalistic, and political genres, little attention has been given to its cross-linguistic mediation between English and Arabic in spontaneous spoken political interaction. Addressing this gap, the present study explores how evaluative, epistemic, and interpersonal meanings are linguistically constructed in English ambassadorial interviews and how these meanings are transferred, preserved, or modified in Arabic translations. The study draws on three complementary frameworks: Biber’s (2006) lexico-grammatical classification of stance, Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory, and Munday’s (2012) translation-oriented evaluation model. The dataset comprises a small but specialized bilingual corpus of six interviews (11,433 words), selected for their authenticity, institutional relevance, and the availability of official Arabic translations from reputable media outlets. A mixed-methods design was employed, utilizing quantitative analysis to determine the distribution and frequency of stance markers across both corpora, while qualitative analysis examined the interpersonal and evaluative functions of these markers and the translational strategies employed to render them. Quantitative results show that modal and semi-modal verbs, stance complement clauses controlled by verbs (SCCCBV), and stance adverbs are the most common markers in both languages. Although Arabic translations contain fewer total words, they exhibit a proportionally higher density of stance markers, particularly in modal verbs and SCCCBV constructions, suggesting a tendency toward explicit grammatical signaling of stance. Qualitatively, the findings reveal that translators generally preserve epistemic and attitudinal meanings but sometimes shift degrees of intensity, commitment, or interpersonal alignment. These shifts, whether strengthening, softening, or adjusting evaluative force, are attributed not to meaning loss but to pragmatic conventions in Arabic political communication, which favor explicitness, rhetorical balance, and cultural appropriateness.
