Ideological shifts in the BBC headlines translated into Ukrainian and Russian

Abstract

The study conducts a critical analysis of Ukrainian and Russian versions of news headlines originally published in English on the BBC News website. The corpus comprises 90 news reports (30 in each language) covering politics. The objective is to reveal any shifts in the assumptions and attitudes expressed by the target headlines as compared with the source, and thus in the ideological meaning that the headlines convey. Depending on the type of modification the headlines undergo in translation, they have been divided into three groups: adaptation to the background knowledge of the new target audience, foregrounding some detail of the news story, and permutations. The findings indicate that target headlines are more likely to undergo modifications in translation that result in ideological shifts when news reports refer to Ukraine or Russia, respectively, or bear upon their political interests. The shifts in the Ukrainian headlines mostly reflect the ideology of the pro-Western part of Ukrainian society and, therefore, tend to be subtle, while the shifts in the Russian headlines often make the latter more consistent with the official political ideology in Russia, which in many respects is fundamentally different from the Western point of view upheld by the BBC.