News Headlines as Narrative: Reframing the Israel-Palestine Conflict in English, Turkish and Spanish News Coverage

News translation serves as a pivotal mediating force in the cross-cultural construction of conflict narratives. Particularly in coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, reframing proves unavoidable, as translators inevitably reconstruct events to suit new communicative contexts. In this regard, the primary aim of this study is to conduct a comparative linguistic and textual analysis of English news headlines on the Israel-Palestine conflict and their Turkish and Spanish translations, using three language-specific corpora and integrating predominantly qualitative analysis with quantitative lexical analysis. It investigates how lexical and textual choices shape narrative reframing across the language editions of two news agencies, revealing the extent of reframing under a shared source text. Given that headlines constitute the most visible and ideologically charged component of news texts, the analysis pays particular attention to headline choices across the three languages as condensed sites of narrative reframing. In this study, Mona Baker’s socio-narrative theory (2006) provides the main theoretical framework for understanding translation as a form of narrative reframing, whereby source texts are selectively appropriated, temporally and spatially recast, or ideologically labeled to fit the narrative logic of the receiving culture. The study builds a corpus of news headlines on the conflict that began on 7 October 2023 between Israel and Palestine. Drawing on two multilingual news agencies—EuroNews and CNN—to compile the corpus, the research’s findings indicate that target texts are reframed differently across languages, yet this reframing does not always mirror the target country's ideological stance—Turkish translations, for example, convey a sharper ideological positioning than Spanish ones, despite Spain’s stronger official stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. As a methodological implication, it appears that linguistic analysis alone is insufficient to capture such alignment and that it must be complemented by close textual analysis.