Scholarship in Translation Studies has demonstrated how translation shapes conflict narration by regulating which voices are included or excluded. Mona Baker (2006) advances the view that translation constitutes part of the “institution of war”, mainly because it plays a key role, first, in “circulating and resisting the narratives that create the intellectual and moral environment for violent conflict in the first place”, and second, in mobilizing ordinary people worldwide “to initiate or support a war” (pp. 1–2). If translation participates in the institution of war, then affect constitutes a key dimension of this process. It is through affect that conflict narratives mobilize empathy, anger, or indifference. Nevertheless, the affective work of translation in the reception of conflict narratives remains relatively underexplored. In recent years, translation scholars have begun to engage more extensively with affect, with the focus being on its influence on translators’ experiences, performance, and ethical positioning (Ruokonen & Koskinen, 2017; Hubscher-Davidson, 2021). Critiquing what he calls a “disproportionately low interest” in affect in Translation Studies, Luis Pérez-González (2016, p. 125) examines how affect functions as a biopolitical force in activist subtitling and argues that the circulation of self-mediated content fosters affective receptivity and political engagement among transnational audiences. Kaisa Koskinen (2020, p. 13), while similarly expanding affect beyond individualized emotion, conceptualizes affect as a dynamic interaction between body and mind, characterized by mutual transformation and shaped by sociopolitical context. Despite such contributions, affect in translation continues to be approached primarily through the lens of translators’ subjectivity.
This article shifts attention from the translator’s internal emotional experience to the role of journalistic translation in mediating affective engagement with conflict discourse across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2004) theory of affective economies, it conceptualizes translation as a site where emotions circulate, attach to bodies, and acquire social and political force. The article advances this conceptualization through a narrative analysis of a corpus of eleven English-language field reports published by the Cable News Network (CNN) between October 2023 and April 2025, each featuring translated testimonies by Gaza residents. The analysis focuses on how CNN, as a global media outlet, uses translation to regulate emotional responses to conflict and trauma by determining whose suffering becomes visible, which emotions are amplified, and which are suppressed. Ahmed’s theory provides a range of analytical tools that inform the analysis: the non-residence and stickiness of affect, its tendency to travel through associative chains, its backward pull on historical memory, and its role in constituting collective identity. Together, these tools provide a critical framework for tracing how emotions become attached to specific figures, accumulate value as they circulate, and shape patterns of recognition and exclusion.
It is argued that the testimonies examined in this case study construct affective economies organized mainly around grief and helplessness, which attach disproportionately to specific figures, particularly women, children, and journalists. These figures dominate the corpus and emerge as the primary conduits through which Palestinian suffering becomes affectively legible. While women and children have long served as paradigmatic figures of innocence within humanitarian discourse, journalists occupy a more complex position. Put succinctly, their affective charge derives less from perceived helplessness than from the moral authority associated with bearing witness and from forms of professional solidarities that amplify their suffering within media networks. The affective responses their deaths or injuries elicit therefore differ in tone but ultimately contribute to the same emotional economy of humanitarian appeal. An important corollary is the uneven distribution of affect, wherein emotional visibility becomes a precondition for accessing care, and by extension survival itself, with biopolitical effects that reinforce hierarchies of whose lives are sustained and whose remain outside global concern. These dynamics unfold alongside a process of testimonial containment, in which the subject’s humanitarian needs, emotional fragility, and social vulnerability take precedence over sustained critique of war and occupation. The Palestinian witnesses are thus positioned not as political subjects articulating claims to justice or sovereignty, but as passive victims in need of humanitarian relief. Extending Ahmed’s theory of affective economies, the article introduces resemiotization as a key process that regulates how affect circulates across modalities.
The significance of this study lies in demonstrating how translation shapes emotional alignments that can be politically mobilized to uphold or contest dominant narratives of suffering and global solidarity. As Esther Peeren (2019) notes, affective economies, like other economies, “obfuscate the conditions for creating value, making it seem natural” (p. 843). That is, we rarely question why certain emotions stick to particular groups, for example why refugees are often framed with fear or pity, or why suffering children elicit empathy while other victims do not. These emotional associations do not arise from the groups themselves but take shape through affective circulations. By tracing how translation mediates these emotional attachments, the study rethinks translation as an infrastructural force in the governance of affect in global media, one that structures not only what is heard, but also what is felt, by whom, and under what conditions.
Affective economies as analytical lens
In affect theory, affect and emotion are often conflated, but theorists such as Brian Massumi (1995) have drawn a clear distinction between them. For him, affect refers to intensity: a bodily, pre-conscious force that exists independently of semantic qualification. It is, in his words, “not ownable or recognizable, and is thus resistant to critique” (Massumi, 1995, p. 222). Emotion, by contrast, is “qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized” (Massumi, 1995, p. 221). Affect, then, is irreducible to meaning, because it escapes capture by discourse even as it drives experience. This distinction has gained traction in media and cultural studies, where affect is often viewed as the autonomous, raw force that underlies and exceeds socially coded emotion.
Sara Ahmed challenges the dichotomy between affect and emotion by emphasizing their entanglement in language, bodies, and history. As she observes, attempting to separate the two is akin to “breaking an egg in order to separate the yolk from the white” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 210). This metaphor illustrates her view of affect and emotion as co-constitutive rather than ontologically separate. Accordingly, the distinction between affect and emotion becomes less important than their shared capacity to generate attachments, boundaries, and orientations through circulation. To conceptualize this dynamic, Ahmed introduces the notion of “affective economies” as a framework that shifts attention away from what emotions are to what they do. The framework theorizes emotions as circulating between bodies, signs, texts, historical memory, and objects. It is this circulation that gives emotions their social force and allows them to accumulate value and meaning through repetition and association. Ahmed (2004) argues that “emotions do not positively inhabit any-body as well as any-thing, meaning that ‘the subject’ is simply one nodal point in the economy, rather than its origin and destination” (p. 121). In a similar vein, translation as a discursive practice emerges as one such nodal point, a mechanism that enables emotions to move across geographies and audiences, and, in so doing, to acquire value in their circulation. Or to put this in Ahmed’s (2004) formulation, “emotions work as a form of capital: affective value is accrued through circulation” (p. 120).
The framework of affective economies conceptualizes a set of mechanisms through which emotions travel, and these dynamics are central to this study. One key mechanism is stickiness, namely the tendency for certain emotions to attach themselves to particular figures, bodies, or signs through repetition. Emotions such as grief or fear become “sticky” by circulating in association with specific racialized, gendered, or politicized subjects (e.g., the refugee, the terrorist, the innocent child). This adhesive quality is not inherent to the emotions or the figures themselves but arises through repeated movement and association across discursive contexts. As Margaret Wetherell (2012) argues, “it is the discursive that very frequently makes affect powerful, makes it radical and provides the means for affect to travel” (p. 19). This illustrates how narrative and discursive apparatuses, such as those embedded in translation, enable affect to circulate with mobility and resonance across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Koskinen (2020) further explores this dynamic by examining how translation and interpreting involve affective labour, that is, the effort “to produce and modulate affects in either personal interaction (such as most interpreting scenarios) or in textually transmitted communication (in translation)” (p. 32). She links the stickiness of affect to professionally salient qualities such as trust, neutrality, and competence, which gain emotional charge by being repeatedly enacted in practice and recognized within institutional settings and client relationships.
Affect moves sideways through associative chains that bind signs together so that figures like ‘the terrorist’ or ‘the militant’ come to slide into one another, a process that, as Ahmed (2004) theorizes, underpins the production of stickiness in affective economies. With the metonymical circulation of affect, repeated associations allow distinct figures to become emotionally aligned under a single rubric of fear or threat. Far from linear or fixed, these movements are relational and cumulative, producing as they do emotional meaning through recurring shifts in association rather than through stable definitions. In addition to moving sideways, affect moves backward by reactivating past associations or memories that subtly shape present responses. This backward motion, Ahmed (2004) notes, “reopens past associations” and, thus, enable historical grievances, racial legacies, or imperial fears to reemerge in the present (p. 120). This backward pull of emotion anchors affective responses in historical memory, hence reinforcing the emotional charge of figures already made sticky through sideways movement. In this way, the past and present become affectively entangled: older associations resurface to intensify contemporary patterns of emotional legibility and uptake. For Ahmed, the cumulative effect of sideways and backward movements is that certain bodies come to be read as the cause of our feelings, whether fear, pity, love, or resentment, as if they naturally evoke such responses. The figure of ‘the terrorist’, Ahmed (2004) suggests, may acquire its stickiness both sideways—through association with terms like ‘militant’, ‘refugee’, or ‘foreign’—and backward, through the reactivation of historical narratives and broader cultural scripts of racialized threat.
Finally, at a more structural level, the framework of affective economies draws attention to how the cumulative circulation of affect contributes to the formation of collective identities. As emotions become patterned and routinized, they do more than orient individual responses: they “align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 119). In other words, the repetition of emotional alignments over time helps constitute who belongs to a group and what values or histories that group embodies. With these conceptual foundations established, the next section outlines the methodological approach used to examine CNN’s reporting on Palestinian testimonies.
Corpus and Methodology
CNN, a US-based outlet owned by Warner Bros Discovery, primarily targets American audiences but retains strong global visibility and influence in shaping international news narratives. The selection of CNN as a case study derives from its privileged level of access during the 2023-2025 Gaza war, when its correspondents were embedded with Israeli military forces during high-intensity operations (CNN, 2023). This level of embeddedness positions the network as an active participant in narrating the conflict from the Israeli side. At the risk of overstatement, we might say that CNN has been among the few major Western media outlets to feature Palestinian testimonies from within Gaza. This makes CNN a critical site for analysing how journalistic translation mediates the circulation of affect and conditions the legibility of suffering.
The corpus comprises eleven English-language field reports published by CNN between October 2023 and April 2025. These were identified through a systematic site-specific search of CNN’s online archive using the fixed query “testimonies from Gaza site:cnn.com”, which ensured transparent and non-selective retrieval. I used the term “testimonies” in the search query because CNN consistently employed this term to describe segments featuring Gazans speaking in their own voice about events they directly experienced. Given that news archives and Google indexing are dynamic, the corpus reflects the set of field reports that were retrievable under the fixed search query during the period of data collection. The selected time frame spans the initial outbreak of hostilities through successive phases of military escalation and international response. Although limited in number, the corpus is proportionate to CNN’s coverage of Palestinian testimonies and analytically rich, as each report offers multilayered narratives that integrate eyewitness accounts mediated through English translation, alongside editorial framing and visual documentation through embedded videos and images. In fact, while CNN enjoyed privileged access to Israeli operations, it sought to justify its limited engagement with Palestinian voices by telling viewers that “Egypt and Israel have made access for international journalists next to impossible”, with the result that they had to rely on freelance local journalists in Gaza (Kaur, 2024). This might explain the relatively small number of field reports featuring Palestinian testimonies. Additionally, only the network’s most significant on-air segments were subsequently adapted into published reports. The corpus thus captures CNN’s most consequential testimonies.
Methodologically, the study applies Catherine Riessman’s (2008) four approaches to narrative analysis: thematic, structural, dialogic/performance, and visual. She observes that “narratives are composed for particular audiences at moments in history, and they draw on taken-for-granted discourses and values circulating in a particular culture” (Riessman, 2008, p. 3). Building on this insight, the study treats the testimonies as situated constructions whose affective meanings take shape through the mediating work of translational and editorial framing. The analysis proceeds by identifying recurring patterns across the corpus and then illustrating these patterns through close readings of the reports. First, thematic analysis captures recurring affective economies across the testimonies, particularly those of women, children, and journalists, since they dominate the corpus and serve as the primary vehicles for CNN’s affective framing. Second, structural analysis complements thematic analysis by examining the narrative architecture of the reports and accompanying video segments, including elements such as sequencing, pacing, and closure. These structural choices demonstrate how affective force is produced through the organization of testimonies as much as through their content. Third, dialogic/performance analysis draws attention to the multi-voiced and co-constructed nature of testimony, with due attention given to the constitutive role of translation as it unfolds in the accompanying videos, whether through subtitling or voice-over, since these segments provide the only access to the source text. Fourth, visual analysis is indispensable for understanding the interplay of subtitles, voiceovers, images, and the written text, particularly how such visual elements interact with translation to intensify or constrain affective force. In line with these methodological orientations, three reports produced outside Gaza were excluded from close analysis: two video testimonies, each featuring a surviving woman receiving treatment abroad, included only a couple of descriptive lines and thus lacked sufficient textual or material for structural or dialogic analysis. The third report, which featured a male poet who fled the war and now resides in the United States, was conducted in English and focused mainly on his poetry, with no translated material. Accordingly, eight reports were selected for detailed analysis, with the remaining pieces serving as contextual references.
The affective accumulation of helplessness and grief
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian factions launched a large-scale military operation known as al-Aqsa Flood. They infiltrated Israeli-controlled territories and carried out coordinated attacks on military and civilian targets, including a music festival, which resulted in numerous casualties and the taking of hostages. Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza led to unprecedented levels of destruction and loss of life, with tens of thousands killed and nearly two million displaced (Al-Mughrabi, 2025). Within this broader context, the CNN reports examined here reveal a discernible pattern of a humanitarian affective economy in which Palestinian grief, helplessness, and loss are foregrounded, while politically subversive emotions, such as defiance or collective resistance, elude representation. Translation is not “secondary or incidental” to these reports but a condition of their production (Walkowitz, 2015, p. 15). In these reports, translation is the condition that enables Palestinian suffering to be articulated and recognized within global news discourse. This becomes most apparent in the systematic use of translation as a framing device: out of eleven reports, six employ translations as their titles, such as “We are dying slowly” (Noor Haq & Rahimi, 2024) and “Mama, I’m tired—I want to die” (Mahmood et al., 2025). The remaining five underscore their translational nature indirectly through titles like “A heartbreaking story of survival: A mother’s tragic tale from war-torn Gaza” (CNN, 2024b).
These affective economies of helplessness, grief and loss materialize through the differential attachment of affective intensity to specific bodies, especially mothers, children and, to a lesser extent, fathers. The testimony of Hanadi El-Jamara, a Palestinian mother-of-seven speaking from Gaza about the deteriorating health of her children quoted in translation from Arabic as “They are weak now, they always have diarrhea, their faces are yellow” and “We are dying slowly… I think it’s even better to die from bombs, at least we will be martyrs”—illustrates how CNN’s framing translates suffering into an affective language of helplessness (Noor Haq & Rahimi, 2024). In this context, helplessness and maternal despair become affectively sticky to the figure of the Palestinian mother and her children. It is important to note that the report uses translation in a fragmentary manner as a form of commentary on the narrator’s voice. It offers short, translated phrases stripped of the interview’s broader context or the Arabic source text, thus narrowing the interpretive possibilities available to readers. Viewed through Erving Goffman’s (1981) notion of “frame space”, which refers to the layered interactional context that shapes how participants, utterances, and events are positioned, this fragmentary use of translation shows how the testimonies are recontextualized within CNN’s institutional framing of the conflict and its hierarchies of visibility. Goffman (1981) notes that frame space is “normatively allocated” (p. 230) in the sense that, as Baker (2006) explains, “a contribution is deemed acceptable when it stays within the frame space allocated to the speaker or writer and unacceptable when it falls outside that space” (pp. 109–110). That being the case, fragmentary translation functions as a regulatory mechanism that keeps the testimonies within an acceptable humanitarian frame that positions the witness as a passive sufferer whose voice elicits empathy but seldom articulates political critique.
The invocation of martyrdom in El-Jamara’s testimony entails a slide from the image of the grieving mother as an emblem of civilian innocence and humanitarian suffering to the image of the shaheed (martyr), a figure of national struggle and resistance against occupation. This affective reorientation exemplifies what Ahmed (2004) describes as “the failure of affect to be located in a subject or object” (p. 117), which is not a lack, but a condition that enables affect to circulate and generate collective surfaces of attachment. In this case, affect associated with martyrdom is reoriented from histories of political resistance toward a humanitarian economy that centres maternal helplessness and despair as its primary emotional currency. In her study of France’s humanitarian immigration practices, Miriam Ticktin (2011) shows that a politics grounded in care and protection can lead the state and the public to view suffering through a medical lens. Within this framework, the figure of a female victim of violence gradually takes over the role once held by the sick body as the most effective subject for eliciting compassion and legitimizing humanitarian intervention. As Carolina Kobelinsky (2012) observes in her review of Ticktin’s work, compassion within such humanitarian regimes is a selective process shaped by “the images of the colonial legacy that are present in the national imagination (e.g., the pitiful Muslim women, the antimodernist Arab men)” (p. 456). It can thus be argued that such a focus on gendered suffering in the testimonies resonates with Western imaginaries in which female bodies are coded as inherently innocent and vulnerable, traits that make their suffering emotionally resonant and politically actionable within humanitarian and media frameworks.
The report featuring El-Jamara’s testimony regulates the intensity of helplessness by engaging in “resemiotization”, a process Rick Iedema (2003) defines as involving “how meaning shifts from context to context, from practice to practice, or from one stage of a practice to the next” (p. 41). He illustrates this process through the transformation of spoken discussion into a written report and then into architectural design, with each stage reconfiguring meaning. Similarly, the report reshapes the meaning of Palestinian suffering by moving across multiple representational modes: reporter narration, paraphrased translations, direct translated quotations, and video inserts featuring UN officials elaborating on the testimonies. Here, resemiotization orchestrates an affective rhythm through which helplessness and grief circulate. Reporter narration situates speakers within a broader humanitarian frame. Paraphrased speech communicates a general emotional tone, while quoted translations distil testimony into vivid signs of bodily distress. This progression culminates in a call for humanitarian intervention that directs the affective build-up toward empathy and relief rather than political critique.
On closer inspection, El-Jamara is introduced through the reporters’ voice as a figure of maternal helplessness, as in the description, “these days, the mother-of-seven finds herself begging for food on the mud-caked streets of Rafah, in southern Gaza” (Noor Haq & Rahimi, 2024). By paraphrasing her words as “she tries to feed her kids at least once a day, she says, while tending to her husband, a cancer and diabetes patient”, the report recasts her suffering in a tone of subdued distress. Direct quotations, translated from Arabic, then distil this suffering into visceral signs, such as the repeated mention of “diarrhea,” and phrases like “dying slowly” and “eating grass”. These signs index the embodied toll of siege and displacement. Most importantly, they slide across different figures such as children cast as premature providers, an aging grandmother, and a diabetic father. However, they consistently return to and accumulate around the mother, whose suffering is mainly emphasized through translated quotations in the reports and through video sequences depicting her distress with accompanying voiceover narration, thus consolidating the mother as the primary figure of suffering and care. Through repetition, affective cues, and resemiotization, the experiential weight of famine under blockade lends itself to humanitarian recognition and emotional consumption within global media economies.
As maternal and child figures recur across testimonies, they merge into composite icons of suffering and central conduits for humanitarian appeal. Tamara Al-Maarouf, whose four-month-old son Jihad lies critically ill in one of Gaza’s few remaining hospitals, is shown in a video segment embedded in another report by Karadsheh et al. (2024). She appears in tears before her son’s operation as she begs the international community for help. Her testimony is mediated in two ways: in the video her Arabic testimony is briefly audible before being overlaid by an English voiceover narrating her words. Al-Maarouf’s statement “اليوم عنده عملية إنقاذ حياة” (Today he has a life-saving operation) is rendered in voice-over as: “Today he is going to surgery to try and save his life because he cannot be evacuated, the mother says” (Karadsheh et al., 2024).1 While the source text is concise and clinical in naming the procedure as life-saving, the translation introduces a tone of uncertainty through the phrase “to try and save his life” and foregrounds structural obstruction (“because he cannot be evacuated”). These interventions intensify the sense of vulnerability and redirect affect toward the blockade as the source of danger without naming who enforces or sustains it. Through voice-over, CNN reclaims narrative authority, determining how the mother’s grief should be heard and felt.
In the written report, Al-Maarouf’s plea appears in the form of a direct English quotation translated from Arabic, “These are children, they are not carrying weapons… Why can’t he be evacuated?... what did a 4-month-old do”. The denial that the children are carrying weapons reflects an affective negotiation with longstanding securitization narratives that portray children as “a part of the broader Palestinian security threat” (Joronen, 2016, p. 17). In positioning children as non-threatening, however, the report simultaneously reinscribes Palestinian life within a framework where the provision of care hinges on the demonstrability of childhood innocence. The crux of the matter here is that the testimonies discussed thus far not only circulate emotionally charged narratives that invite identification but also implicitly or explicitly call for action, such as increased humanitarian aid, psychological support for children, medical evacuations, or ceasefire. Notably, at the end of the video, Al-Maarouf is faintly heard pleading, “وين العرب حسبي الله ونعم الوكيل” (Where are the Arabs? God is sufficient for me, and He is the best disposer of affairs), a line that CNN leaves untranslated (Karadsheh et al., 2024). Its omission redirects the emotional address: rather than appealing to an Arab collective responsibility or invoking divine justice, the translation funnels affect toward an international humanitarian audience presumed to be the primary agent of relief.
The same report, in its calls for ceasefire, juxtaposes Al-Maarouf’s testimony with Israeli accounts, particularly the story of Oded Lifschitz, an elderly hostage who remained in captivity until his death in 2025, and the pleas of his daughter Sharone from London. Though she recalled the abduction of both parents on October 7, her narrative focused on her father, since her mother, Yocheved Lifshitz, had been released after 16 days in captivity. Unlike Al-Maarouf, Sharone’s testimonies are delivered directly in English and appear both as written quotations and through her spoken voice in the accompanying CNN video, where her face registers controlled signs of sorrow. Sharone recalls her father’s long-standing commitment to peace and his voluntary work driving patients from Gaza to hospitals in East Jerusalem decades ago, while also evoking her mother Yocheved’s activism through a family photo. As CNN narrates, “she beamed with pride as she pointed to one of her mother, Yocheved Lifschitz, taken decades ago, with a sign in Hebrew that reads ‘Shalom,’ or peace” (Karadsheh et al., 2024). The Hebrew term shalom is frequently used in broader humanitarian and reconciliation discourses in conjunction with the Arabic salaam and the English “peace” to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians, which speaks to its significance as a keyword in such contexts (e.g., Hammond, 2014). Here, shalom acquires “affective value” that “shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 121). That is, it is not only the word on the placard that signifies peace, but the way pride is inscribed on Sharone’s face and posture, making her body itself a surface through which affect circulates.
The report shuttles between Sharone’s on-screen interview and family images of her parents, including scenes of Oded playing the piano or gardening, before cutting back to Gaza’s hospitals where children are treated, mothers weep, and rubble dominates the frame. As Sue-Ann Harding (2013) notes, eyewitness accounts in conflict reporting often lose force through “awkward translations”, “indirect speech”, and selective “cutting and pasting” that subordinate their accounts to larger political narratives (p. 301). This dynamic is perceivable in the report’s treatment of Al-Maarouf’s testimony, which appears fragmented, mediated, and remixed with affect-laden imagery of hospitals and ruins. By contrast, Sharone’s testimony is presented in full and with minimal mediation, reinforced with intimate familial imagery whose affective charge reaches back to her parents’ peace advocacy. This enables viewers to identify with the family’s agency as much as their suffering. The result is an asymmetrical affective economy in which Al-Maarouf’s testimony elicits compassion bound to helplessness, while Sharone’s testimony invites proximate identification grounded in moral agency.
Who gets to live? Journalists and the uneven economies of care
The asymmetrical distribution of affect also manifests in the selective focus on journalists. In a report by Polglase et al. (2024) of the “Flour Massacre” that occurred on February 28, journalist Jihad Abu Watfa stands out among 22 witnesses interviewed by CNN, some of whose testimonies appear in the written report, as a courageous figure who risks death to document the massacre and secure aid for his family. The embedded video, subtitled in English and also quoted in the written text, features only two witnesses: a wounded survivor shown fleetingly and Abu Watfa, whose account becomes the affective centre of the segment. His testimony appears as follows:
| Source Text |
قررنا إن إحنا نواجه الخطر أو نغامر بحياتنا من أجل الحصول على أي لقمة عيش لعائلاتنا. يعني كان شعور جدًا لا يوصف من خوف وارتباك. خايف لا سمح الله ترجع لأهلك شهيد. الحي أبقى من الميت. أنا هاخد أكل إلي ولأطفالي. |
| Back translation |
We decided that we would face the danger or gamble with our lives in order to get any bite of livelihood for our families I mean, it was a feeling that is truly indescribable—of fear and confusion You fear, God forbid, going back to your family as a martyr. The living is more lasting than the dead. I’m going to take food for myself and for my children. |
| Subtitles |
We decided to face the danger, to risk our lives to obtain any piece of bread for our families. The feeling was totally indescribable, fear, confusion… You fear, God forbid, going back to your family as a martyr. The living takes precedence over the dead. I must get food for myself and my children. |
The translation of “أي لقمة عيش” (any bite of livelihood) as “any piece of bread” compresses an idiomatic expression for the very means of living into the image of bread, which resonates with the report’s “Flour Massacre” framing by materializing survival in a single elemental staple. Here, affect sticks to the journalist-father who reaches for a piece of bread with one hand and films with the other. Visually, the video reinforces this dual role by alternating between shots of Abu Watfa filming the massacre and shots of him giving testimony as a journalist-father seeking food, thus merging documentation and survival into a single continuum of witness. The Arabic sharpens this contrast: in Abu Watfa’s footage of the massacre, he speaks in Standard Arabic with the composure of a journalist, whereas in his later testimony he turns to Palestinian Arabic to voice the immediacy of a father’s experience. While ellipses in subtitling are typically used to manage timing or condensation (e.g., Chaume, 2004), the ellipsis following “fear, confusion…” acts as an affective marker that translates the witness’s speechlessness into a visible trace of trauma. This emotional investment is intensified in Abu Watfa’s statement “I must get food for myself and my children”. The future clitic ha in “هاخد” (I’m going to take), which signals intention or imminence in colloquial Arabic, is rendered as “I must get”, a shift that replaces volitional with deontic modality and, in so doing, boosts the affective force of the line.
The culturally grounded ethic of survival, invoked in the force of the Arabic proverb Abu Watfa uses, “the living takes precedence over the dead”, redirects the affective focus toward his children, whose absent-yet-invoked bodies gather urgency and moral weight around his action. Equally significant is the rendering of “نحن الآن محاصرون هنا” (We are now besieged here) as “A tank is beside me, we are now under siege here” in the footage Abu Watfa films during the massacre. The added detail, “A tank is beside me”, is drawn from the visual field rather than his speech, and it intensifies the immediacy of danger by locating the threat at his physical boundary. The tank thus functions as a visual sign through which fear materializes and circulates. As Ahmed (2004) observes, “affect does not reside positively in the sign or body but is produced only as an effect of its circulation” (p. 120). The affective charge arises from the interplay of the voiced translation with the filmed footage, where the added detail mediates what the viewer sees and amplifies the circulation of fear through sound and image. These translations concentrate fear, responsibility, and survival on Abu Watfa as a journalist-father, hence making him the primary vessel through which viewers apprehend the stakes of the scene. The second eyewitness, a wounded survivor in a hospital bed, appears only for a few seconds. Asked “وين الإصابة إجت؟” (Where were you injured?), he replies “في صدري وخرجت من ظهري” (In my chest, and it went out through my back). The translation, literal and clinically precise, confines his testimony to the wound itself, making his body the surface through which pain becomes legible and affect circulates. Fear and pity adhere to his injured form and turn him into affective proof rather than a narrating subject.
Crucially, CNN shows not only the physical risks faced by Palestinian journalists but also their emotional labour. In another journalist-focused report (Radford et al., 2024), local photojournalist Mohammad Ahmed recounts in Arabic, in words rendered into English, “I am also a human. I would stop filming and try to find an empty place to cry… These scenes affect us immensely because those are our people, and they are human, and they are like our children”. This humanizing discourse gains force through the interaction between translation and visual setting. In an embedded clip in the report, filmed inside Ahmed’s ruined house, he addresses CNN’s audience while standing among the rubble and the destroyed toys of his children, with occasional glances at footage on his phone showing their lives before the war:
| Source Text |
نرجو أن نكون نحن قد وفقنا بإيصال الواقع الذي يعيشه قطاع غزة. نتمنى أيضا أن تسمعوا الرواية منا ما تسمعوا عنا. |
| Back Translation |
We hope that we have been granted success in conveying the reality that the Gaza Strip is living. We also hope that you hear the narrative from us, not about us. |
| Subtitles |
We hope that we have succeeded in conveying the reality that the Gaza Strip is experiencing. I hope you will hear the story from us. And not from others about us. |
The scene’s visual composition deepens the emotional resonance of Ahmed’s words: the rubble and toys allow affect to move sideways across shared loss and domestic ruin, while the prewar footage invites affect to move backward in time toward memory and innocence. This closing appeal asserts the moral authority of local journalists as mediators of truth amid devastation. The explicitation of the phrase “ما تسمعوا عنا” (not about us) as “and not from others about us” broadens the emotional and communicative scope of the appeal by pointing to the intermediaries through whom Palestinian voices are filtered and expressing a desire to be heard directly instead. Moreover, the rendering of “نتمنى” (we hope) as “I hope” individualizes the collective voice by transforming a communal plea into a personal appeal aimed at a global audience. As Ahmed (2004) suggests, affect sticks through recognition and proximity, and these translational choices heighten both. The rendering of the lexical item “رواية” as “story” rather than “narrative” marks a shift from journalistic discourse to a more personal, humanizing mode. This lexical choice draws the audience closer to the speaker’s experience, because it frames the act of testimony less as a political claim to truth and more as a shared account of suffering that invites emotional identification. Most importantly, these translational interventions serve the report’s broader humanitarian aim of securing protection and evacuation for Gaza’s wounded journalists.
The translation of this testimony is significant for understanding the political economy of journalism under occupation. Selecting a local photojournalist foregrounds a form of labour that is essential to the production of international news from Gaza yet usually rendered invisible in the final narrative. His words, and the space given to mourn on camera, shows how “international journalism is a domestic affair” in the Occupied Territories and how “understanding the multiple dimensions of this domesticity complicates the enshrined epistemic virtues of disinterest, distance, and neutrality” (Bishara, 2012, p. 129). But even within this allotted space, Palestinian journalists remain constrained by the institution’s professional norm of objectivity as an epistemic value. The shift from “narrative”, with its connotation of perspective and framing, to the more personal and affective “story” signals how Palestinian journalists operate within “complex institutions that tend to especially limit [their] ability to express themselves” (Bishara, 2012, p. 129). Their withholding of tears on-camera reflects the embodied discipline of global newsrooms, where emotional restraint is tied to professional legitimacy. This stands in contrast to pan-Arab outlets such as Al-Jazeera, where journalists have at times wept openly on air as part of a shared horizon of grief and solidarity.
A different dynamic of affect emerges when Arabic-speaking Western journalists mediate the scene of suffering by speaking for the injured. In Harmeet Kaur’s (2024) journalist-centred report, Clarissa Ward, CNN’s chief international correspondent, enters Gaza and states on camera that international journalists have been largely prevented from accessing the Strip due to Israeli and Egyptian restrictions. She heads directly to a field hospital, where she encounters eight-year-old Jinan, whose femur was crushed in a bombardment. The little girl does not verbalize her pain; instead, Ward asks and responds for her, saying in Palestinian Arabic "فيه وجع كتير ... لا ما في" (there is a lot of pain? … no, there is not). She self-translates this as “she said she is not in pain, so that is good”. Self-translation here operates through what Jeremy Munday (2012a) terms “evaluative explicitation” whereby the journalist does not simply translate but frames the child’s pain through added evaluative cues that guide the viewer’s emotional response (p. 54). Ward visibly holds back her tears as she says “لا تبكي حبيبتي” (do not cry, my darling) and self-translates it as (“Do not cry”), while the camera shifts to Jinan’s mother, who weeps and expresses regret for not being there when her daughter was injured, thereby relocating the emotional centre of the scene to maternal grief. These emotional states exemplify “the rippling effect of emotions”, a sideways movement through which affect sticks to new figures and situations and, in so doing, acquires different intensities as it travels (Ahmed, 2004, p. 120).
Ward functions as an “image broker” mediating what is seen and how viewers are guided to understand and feel the scene, with translation shaping the frames through which images and meaning circulate (Gürsel, 2016, p. 296). Her movement through the hospital makes this brokerage visible: she films emergency treatments while translating the brief exchanges between doctors and patients, such as “شو اسمك؟” (What is your name?) and pauses to show blood-stained prescriptions. These interactions between translation and image heighten emotional intensity by foregrounding the immediacy of suffering. For greater contextual understanding, it should be noted that the report acknowledges the affective power of young Gazans’ “raw, selfie-style videos” circulating on social media, which have gained traction among young audiences worldwide, who seek more immediate and emotionally resonant coverage of the war, something they feel “they haven’t gotten from traditional media outlets” (Kaur, 2024). In this light, the embedding of Ward’s footage can be read as an attempt to keep up with the affective momentum generated by these young image brokers on social media, who have become “family to the entire world” (Kaur, 2024).
The dark side of such affective economies, as Adriana Soaita (2025) and Peeren (2019) show, lies in how emotions adhere to specific figures and spaces in ways that reinforce political inequalities and determine who is recognized as deserving of care. As affect selectively attaches to certain recognizable figures, such as mothers, children, or heroic journalists, it shapes public perception of who is worthy of empathy, protection, and moral investment. This dynamic can be seen in CNN’s reports, where women, children, and journalists are shown being evacuated or receiving medical treatment in Qatar, Jerusalem and other countries (see e.g., CNN, 2024a; CNN, 2024b). A key consequence is the marginalization of other victims, who do not as easily attract the same affective investment and thus remain less visible within prevailing economies of empathy. It should be noted that fathers occupy a marginal place in the reports. Their testimonies are rare, and when they appear, they add little new affective texture, instead echoing and reinforcing the humanitarian appeals voiced by women and children. In a report by Jeremy Diamond et al. (2025), a Gazan father standing on rubble declares, in translated testimony from Arabic, “They are fighting us through our food”, a plea that follows Umm Muhammad and her children’s accounts of famine encapsulated in her statement, likewise translated, “the food aid is what’s keeping us alive”. The father’s words do not shift the emotional frame but consolidate it. Within this structure of witnessing, fathers appear as secondary figures, who complete the emotional circuit that centres familial dependence and humanitarian need. Even in mediating the testimony of the poet Mosab Abu Toha (Marques & Wells, 2024), CNN evokes the story of his seven-year-old cousin Sama and her family, who were killed by Israeli forces, to intensify emotional impact and reinforce a familiar humanitarian frame.
Significant to this study is that the uneven distribution of affect reinforces a biopolitical order in which access to life-sustaining resources, such as food or medical care, is mediated through institutional mechanisms and, more critically, through emotional visibility. In this context, biopolitics refers to a form of governance concerned with regulating populations and managing the conditions of life itself. As Michel Foucault (1978) describes, it is a power that seeks “to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order” (p. 138). Affect is central to this process, with global media acting as a key mediator in determining whose lives are made visible and thereby sustained through access to care, aid, and protection. What could be more telling of this dynamic than the extensive media coverage of Palestinian journalists evacuated to Qatar. CNN, The Guardian, and Al-Jazeera prominently reported on Wael al-Dahdouh's medical evacuation alongside Motaz Azaiza's and Ola Al Zaanoon's evacuations for safety (e.g., Radford et al., 2024). Their visibility in global media transformed them into affectively charged figures of endurance and sacrifice, thus facilitating access to care and safety that remains inaccessible to the broader, less-mediatized population under siege. In such affective economies, visibility hinges on emotional legibility, and what is at stake is not only access to care but to life itself, both of which become inseparable from the narratives and figures that media institutions deem worthy of moral investment.
Making suffering visible, muting Its causes
It can be argued that the reports produce affective visibility without political force, in the sense of allowing grief to be felt while the grievances that underlie it are diluted. This softening is evident in the tendency to distribute responsibility for the blockade, as perceivable in the claim that “Palestinians have lived through 17 years of partial blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt” (Noor Haq & Rahimi, 2024). In plainer terms, the structural violence is named, but qualified, since the descriptor “partial” and the diffusion of agency across both Israel and Egypt dilute its force. This logic of testimonial containment generates a pattern across the testimonies, including those of children whose suffering is framed through the prism of innocence and vulnerability. In a report by Mahmood et al. (2025) centred on the testimonies of war-affected children in Gaza, the testimonies of Sama, an 8-year-old girl suffering hair loss from war-related trauma, and Anas, a 7-year-old boy who witnessed the killing of his parents by a drone strike, show how grief is selectively circulated within a regulated humanitarian space. In the video embedded in the report, Sama appears inside a tent, holding a shard of mirror and trying to comb the few remaining strands of her hair as she recounts the ridicule she faces from other children:
| Source Text |
بيتنمروا علي يقعدوا بيحكولي يا قرعة يا اللي معك سرطان بحكي لماما هضلني هيك أنا طول عمري بدون شعر لا بموت وبيطلع شعري في الجنة إن شاء الله |
| Back Translation |
They bully me. They keep saying to me: you bald one, you with cancer. I say to my mom: Will I stay like this my whole life without hair? No, I will die, and my hair will grow in Paradise, God willing. |
| Subtitles |
They bully me, calling me “bald girl” or “cancer patient” I ask my mom, will I stay like this, bald, for the rest of my life? No, I want to die and have my hair grown again in paradise. God willing |
The affective charge of Sama’s testimony emerges through the translator’s linguistic choices. The move from second-person vocative forms “يا قرعة” (you bald one) and “يا اللي معك سرطان” (you with cancer) to third-person nominal constructions “bald girl” and “cancer patient” reconfigures direct insults into recognizable identity labels that attach more visibly to the body. When enclosed in quotation marks, these labels acquire affective stickiness and become signs that carry and circulate shame beyond the immediate moment of speech. These stigmatizing labels circulate affect by triggering socially conditioned responses to bodily signs of difference, such as hair loss, particularly in relation to gender norms. As Koskinen (2020) observes, some affective representations are “sticky and catchy in the sense that they tend to trigger predictable and accepted affective responses”, many of which are “linked to our socio-cultural programming related to the collective unconscious and the shadows involved” (p. 175). Here, Sama’s body becomes a site where affective stickiness accumulates not only through war trauma, but through gendered logics that foreground her pain as personal misfortune, even as its political dimensions remain present but less visible. Sama’s grief moves in two directions: sideways, through the ridicule and shame inflicted by other children, and backwards, toward a lost pre-war innocence, evoked through intercut footage of her smiling with a full head of hair before the war.
It bears pointing out that the report’s broader aim is to mobilize international public opinion to provide “psychological support” to “nearly all of Gaza’s 1.2 million children” (Mahmood et al., 2025). In line with this communicative orientation, the translation can be read as employing what Munday (2012b) terms “textual segmentation” (p. 112), breaking speech into short, emotionally charged units that heighten immediacy and identification. The shift from “بحكي” (I say) to “I ask” recasts intimate disclosure as interrogative appeal, while the comma-segmented structure—“will I stay like this, bald, for the rest of my life?”—creates rhythmic pauses that emphasize bodily stigma (“bald”) before arriving at the temporal scope of suffering. Segmented as a question, it cues the emotional shift that occurs when Sama replies, “No, I want to die,” as the juxtaposition of innocent question and devastating answer shapes the scene’s affective force. The closing shot of the mother crying and kissing Sama’s bald scalp intensifies the appeal to international empathy and psychological support through embodied helplessness.
It is this “selling function” of affect that matters here. Instead of directly confronting the war trauma, the report redirects attention toward emotional associations with female suffering—culturally coded shame, emotional fragility, and social vulnerability—turning the girl’s grief and the mother’s helplessness into affective commodities within “a value-and-meaning-generating economy” (Peeren, 2019, p. 837). These emotions circulate in ways that make suffering legible to global audiences but subtly detach it from its broader political origins. Sama’s testimony extends the affective economy of helplessness and grief, now embodied in the wounded, gendered figure of the child. This depiction reflects a dominant affective economy that frames children as passive victims in order to evoke sympathy and mobilize humanitarian aid. Hart (2023, p. 3) identifies this representational tendency in media and humanitarian campaigns, such as those related to Yemen, and argues that such depictions often obscure children’s agency and the subtle ways in which they navigate crises. The subtleties of this argument come into focus when we consider how depictions of children vary across sympathetic media. Al-Jazeera’s coverage (e.g., Al-Jazeera, 2024), known for its support for the Palestinian cause, frequently portray Gaza’s children as enduring hardship while also expressing resilience and a capacity for resistance.
Sama’s account is followed by that of Anas, whose words, accompanied by silent footage of him weeping, appears as an English translation in the report, with no access to the source text: “I was playing with my ball, I went down the stairs and I found Dad and Mom, thrown in the street, a drone came and exploded (on) them” (Mahmood et al., 2025). The awkward translation “a drone came and exploded (on) them” exemplifies how translation can diminish narrative force, as Harding (2013, p. 301) cautions, by introducing awkward phrasing and, in this case, by withholding attribution of responsibility through agentless narration. This framing corresponds to what Luc Boltanski (1999) defines as “the politics of pity”, a mode of representation that hyper-singularizes suffering while detaching it from systemic causes. In Boltanski’s (1999) words, for pity to function as politics, it “must convey at the same time a plurality of situations of misfortune... hyper-singularised through an accumulation of the details of suffering and, at the same time, under-qualified: it is he, but it could be someone else” (p. 12). This paradox can be observed in the depiction of Anas’s and Sama’s stories, which evoke emotional resonance through intimate detail, with political dimensions subtly embedded but overshadowed by the dominant focus on personal suffering.
While mothers and children feature most prominently in the testimonies, one report (Stockwell & Noor Haq, 2024) shifts the emotional economy of trauma to young adults, where affect moves backward by connecting present suffering to inherited dispossession. In this report, which features no embedded video or Arabic source text, 20-year-old Haya Ismail links her current trauma to her grandparents’ experience of the Nakba, as quoted in English translation: “I hate it when I realize that I am reliving the exact wretched fate my grandparents once lived… I too will be traumatized and attached to my past life for as long as I live” (Stockwell & Noor Haq, 2024). Similarly, Fadi Adwan, in his early twenties, clings to the keys of his destroyed house while recalling his earlier confusion about why Palestinians fled in 1948: “When this war happened, I understood”. To further emphasize the historical weight of the Nakba, the report upends a contextual sentence noting that “roughly 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in 1948”, though it refrains from naming the responsible party.
Objects like house keys and land deeds, shown visually and mentioned in the report, serve as affective tokens that symbolize loss and belonging. The keffiyeh, once a functional garment, circulates here as a keepsake from a displaced grandmother, now infused with an enduring sense of dispossession. Mundane items, such as olive branches and keffiyehs, function as what Michael Billig (1995) calls “banal” reminders of nationhood, namely ordinary, often overlooked symbols that, through constant presence in daily life, reinforce a sense of collective national identity. What emerges is an affective economy of loss and grief, constituted through the interplay of translation and material remnants, which render dispossession and identity intelligible through intergenerational emotional continuity. This dynamic is significant insofar as it demonstrates how “emotions and affects are neither discrete nor individual properties, but rather connect individual subjects with one another in their social environment” (Strasser & and Sökefeld, 2025, p. 964). In this context, affect does more than simply reflect memory: it provides the infrastructure through which dispossession travels across time as a living inheritance stitched into objects and voices. As Ahmed (2004) reminds us, affective economies “align bodies with signs and histories” through “the relationality of subjects and objects” (p. 119-121). These affective traces register and collectivize suffering, with Palestinian identity crystallizing through the ordinary objects that carry these memories.
Conclusions
This article has illustrated how Ahmed’s concept of affective economies offers a productive framework for analysing affect in translation and reporting, particularly in conflict contexts where the stakes of recognition, empathy, and silencing are high, and where translation often operates within asymmetrical regimes of visibility and voice. Through an analysis of a corpus of eleven field reports published by CNN between October 2023 and April 2025 that feature translated Palestinian testimonies, it has shown that translation functions as a mechanism of affective governance. Translation regulates which emotions circulate, where they stick, and how they are made to align with CNN’s narrative frameworks. This occurs through systematic shifts in modality (attenuation into intensification), syntactic and prosodic segmentation for heightened salience, evaluative explicitation that steers affective uptake, and deictic realignment (second-person to third-person) that abstracts situated voices into circulable identities. The testimonies, I argued, participate in a humanitarian affective economy that centres mainly on grief, helplessness and loss. It was noted that these testimonies adhere most visibly to the suffering of women, children and journalists. This uneven distribution of affect has material consequences, for it conditions who is seen as deserving of care and protection, as evidenced by the evacuation and medical treatment provided to injured journalists, mothers, and children, whose affective visibility in media reporting rendered them eligible for international humanitarian response. The appeal of these figures, particularly the pitiful Arab woman, the vulnerable child and the wounded journalist, lies in their cultural coding as innocent and apolitical within the Western imagination, which makes them emotionally legible and morally investable subjects capable of attracting international sympathy and humanitarian response.
In the field reports examined here, the testimonies are largely framed through affective registers of helplessness, grief, and loss, which narrows the emotional range within which these particular accounts are allowed to resonate. This orientation is perceivable in the overemphasis on subjects’ emotional fragility and social vulnerability, which takes precedence over showing the broader genocidal and political context. Such emphasis reflects a process of testimonial containment, whereby politically charged narratives are recast in the emotionally resonant language of humanitarian suffering. As a result, the Palestinian witnesses are positioned as helpless victims facing problems that international humanitarian intervention can address, not as political subjects articulating claims to justice, resistance, or sovereignty. These affective economies do not merely shape how suffering is perceived; they structure how global audiences are invited to respond by adopting the roles of benevolent saviours or compassionate witnesses, rather than critically engaged actors who interrogate the systemic roots of violence.
More broadly, Ahmed’s framework provides translation scholars with multiple analytical tools, such as stickiness and the sideways and backward movements of emotion, for tracing how translation shapes the social circulation and attachment of affect. Building on this, the study introduces resemiotization as a key mechanism that regulates both the intensity and direction of affective flow. Here, resemiotization refers to how translated testimonies are progressively paraphrased, excerpted, and revoiced across narration, subtitles, and quoted speech, with each mode recalibrating the emotional weight of suffering and directing it toward humanitarian empathy rather than political claim-making. These tools help scholars examine not only what translations say, but more so what they do affectively. Moreover, the framework of affective economies contributes to the affective turn in translation studies by offering a socially embedded approach to affect that shifts attention from the translator’s internal emotional experience to the broader circuits through which translated texts produce, manage and circulate emotion. Another key contribution lies in showing how translation shapes affective publics, mediates collective emotional attachments, and normalizes emotional hierarchies that reflect and reinforce dominant political imaginaries. As translation scholars seek to understand how global narratives of suffering, resistance and solidarity are constructed, circulated and consumed, Ahmed’s framework offers an indispensable lens for analysing the affective politics of translation and its role in shaping the emotional architecture of contemporary conflict discourse.
