English and Arabic News Translation: Yemeni Gender-based Audience Preferences

Abstract

This research explores Yemeni viewers'/readers' preferences to watch/hear the news whether in Arabic or in English and the networks they prefer from English to Arabic and vice versa. It attempts to investigate gender-based preferences of the Yemeni viewers/readers of the choice of news context. It involves an in-depth look into the English and Arabic news delivered by major news agency networks such as Al-Jazeera English (AJE) and Al-Jazeera Arabic (AJA), in comparison to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in its news coverage in English and Arabic. Through a questionnaire filled in by 93 educated public participants, the results show that the majority of the participants strongly disagree that the general translation tools used by the news agencies in their online sites deliver accurate translations in terms of conveying the same message in different languages. Looking into the news delivery broadcast in both languages in Al-Jazeera and BBC, Aljazeera seems to be favored with gender-based statistically significant differences p-value is ≤ .005. Regarding the preference choice of news context to Yemeni viewers/readers, the Arabic version channel is found to be favored more than the English one in the preference of Yemeni viewers/readers. The majority of participants agree to bias in the news delivered in Arabic to that delivered in English in Yemen.