Over the past few years, the social change that new media has witnessed has been detrimental, and to a certain extent, dangerously damaging to the content of accurate foreign news. To be specific, the language used by foreign newspapers and satellite television channels is often interpreted in a different way to what it may actually mean. The biggest illustration of this is the Arab news channel, Al Jazeera. This is arguably due to the formula of achieveing viewer retention through audience participation.
Researchers and speakers from around the World gathered together last year at the Centre for Arab and Muslim Media Research (CAMMRO) for its fourth annual conference at the King’s College in London. During the conference, it had emerged how the emergent transnational satellite television channels and the Internet (online newspapers in particular) affect politics, the public sphere and the daily lives of the public just by merely translating a news story in a different language.
Instead of pointing towards accurate readability, word for word translating (often in the sense of online newspapers) leads to literal precision. Within the framework of news, some readers may argue that it is essential to be as literal as possible and translate each word as it is it. However, in doing so some may forget the necessity of maintaining clarity of expression.
Non-fluent arabic speakers can use the example of movie subtitles to undertsand this point. Writing from experience, watching a bollywood movie with subtitles often diverts my attention to reading the subtitles and listening to the speech, rather than watching the directions in the movie. I often end up laughing and then sighing at the way exact word for word translating in subtitles can lead to a totally different meaning to what has actually been said.
The same can be said about reading news in English being translated into Arabic, only to witness the information so abundantly present in the original text be substantially altered.
Commercial enterprises have commented that Arab satellite broadcasters do not have an intrinsic interest in politics and the development of societies. Rather, they follow the same rationale as their Western counterparts. That is, to build and retain an audience that can be turned into advertising revenue.
Is it this retention of audience that leads to inaccuracies?
The CAMMRO conference led to the conclusion that the process of media-induced change in the Arab countries, which has only just begun and is unstoppable, will give more power to individual citizens. This will in turn create more commonality between citizens and countries generating new ties between the Arab World and the Western world.
However, does that mean that the Arab nations are now on the fast track to European-style democratisation and open societies or are they on the way to modernise their own traditions, however damaging and painful it may be?
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