Contrastive Analysis of Media Framing in German, Arabic, Spanish, and French: A Corpus-Based Study of Migration Discourse in Translated News Articles

Abstract

The present study utilized a cross-cultural and multilingual corpus of news articles to assess the role of media framing in the migration discourse. The corpus included three hundred news reports from French, Spanish, German, and Arabic media outlets, including some supplementary material. This study investigated the independent role of translation as a reframing device in the construction of refugees and migrants in the discourse on migration. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Baker’s Narrative Theory, and Van Dijk’s Ideological Square were essential theories and tools used for analysis, along with a few others. Results of the study revealed the different mechanisms by which news media outlets maintain power dynamics and reflect cultural ideologies in translated works. These include shifts in translation, lexical framings, and in-group out-group biases.