Reframing Arbaeen Pilgrimage in Western Media through a Cultural Translation: A Framing Analysis

Abstract

As the world's largest annual human gathering, Arbaeen pilgrimage is fast becoming an<br />international event in which, according to several pieces of published news in some of the<br />world's top news agencies such as Independent, a number of people apart from Muslim<br />countries, from several non-Muslim Asian, American, African and European countries<br />participate. This remarkable event has adequate news values including impact, magnitude<br />and bizarreness, but it is underrepresented and/or misrepresented by the western media. It<br />deserves to be systematically discussed in academic discourse. This study made an attempt<br />to situate Western media's representation of Arbaeen within the reframing theory by Baker<br />(2006)and the theory of cultural translation as introduced by Homi Bhabha (1994). The<br />main research question to be pursued by this study was how Arbaeen pilgrimage has been<br />reframed through a cultural translation by Western media in the last 10 years (from 2007<br />to 2017). To this end, news stories of the world's top 10 news agencies covering Arbaeen<br />pilgrimage were chosen as the corpus of this study. The corpus then was analyzed according<br />to Baker's (2006) narrative theory of translation that views translation as a reframing<br />practice. Unlike the mainstream idea that Arbaeen pilgrimage is underrepresented by the<br />Western media, the central argument here was that it is reconstructed and reframed within<br />negative news stories and introduced to unknown audiences as a dangerous event, while<br />this is a narrative with multiple positive implications including peace and solidarity among<br />the nations with volunteers distributing free food and drinks to pilgrims, as well as offering<br />places to relax, wash, and sleep only for Imam Hussein.<br /><br />