Selective appropriation and ideological framing in BBC Persian’s coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict

Drawing on narrative theory and the concept of “selective appropriation,” this research conducts a critical analysis of the translation practices of BBC Persian. The study analyzed the coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict after the attacks of October 7, 2023. A corpus of 48 news reports originally published in English on the BBC World News website and their corresponding Persian translations were comparatively examined. The focus of the study was on the systematic use of omission, addition, substitution, and permutation strategies in the Persian translations of BBC Persian and their ideological implications. The findings demonstrated that BBC Persian engaged in narrative reframing. Throughout a sum of 198 main framing interventions, the Persian versions of the news reports were reframed to align with the presumed ideological and political sensitivities of the Persian-speaking audience. Main strategies consisted of the omission of designating Hamas as a terrorist organization and the addition of a broader geopolitical context. In addition to that, the substitution of claims with facts to assign culpability, and the permutation of the news body and headlines to shift narrative focus from human tragedy to state failure were used. The result was a “localized version” of the news reports that construct a different narrative and ideologically distinct reality from the English source texts.