This synopsis is based on the full paper available here: paper.
Translation Studies scholarship has established that translation shapes conflict narration by regulating which voices are included or excluded. Mona Baker (2006) demonstrates how translation constitutes part of the "institution of war" by circulating narratives that create the intellectual and moral environment for violent conflict. If translation participates in the institution of war, affect constitutes a key dimension of this process, as conflict narratives mobilize empathy, anger, or indifference through affective engagement. Nevertheless, the affective work of translation in conflict reporting remains relatively underexplored. Recent scholarship has begun engaging more extensively with affect in Translation Studies, but the focus remains predominantly on translators' internal experiences, performance, and ethical positioning rather than on how translation mediates affective engagement with conflict discourse across broader publics.
This article shifts attention from the translator's subjectivity to the role of journalistic translation in mediating affective responses to conflict. 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. Ahmed's framework theorizes emotions not as residing within individuals but as moving between bodies, signs, texts, and historical memory, accumulating value through repetition and association. The framework provides analytical tools including the stickiness of affect (its tendency to attach to particular figures through repetition), its sideways movement through associative chains, its backward pull on historical memory, and its role in constituting collective identity. These mechanisms enable analysis of how emotions become attached to specific bodies, how they accumulate value as they circulate, and how they shape patterns of recognition and exclusion in conflict discourse.
The article advances this conceptualization through narrative analysis of eleven English-language field reports published by CNN between October 2023 and April 2025, each featuring translated Palestinian testimonies from Gaza. The corpus was identified through systematic search of CNN's archive and analyzed using Catherine Riessman's (2008) four approaches to narrative analysis: thematic, structural, dialogic/performance, and visual. This methodological approach treats testimonies as situated constructions whose affective meanings emerge through the mediating work of translation and editorial framing, with a particular focus on how recurring patterns manifest across the corpus and how structural choices produce affective force.
The analysis reveals that the testimonies construct affective economies organized primarily around grief and helplessness, which attach disproportionately to specific figures: women, children, and journalists. These figures dominate the corpus and emerge as the primary conduits through which Palestinian suffering becomes affectively legible to global audiences. Women and children serve as paradigmatic figures of innocence within humanitarian discourse, while journalists occupy a more complex position because their affective charge derives from the moral authority of bearing witness and from professional solidarities within media networks. This uneven distribution of affect has biopolitical consequences, as emotional visibility becomes a precondition for accessing care and survival itself, reinforcing hierarchies of whose lives are sustained and whose remain outside global concern.
The study shows that translation operates through systematic linguistic mechanisms that regulate affective intensity and circulation. These include modality shifts that transform attenuation into intensification, syntactic and prosodic segmentation that heightens emotional salience, evaluative explicitation that steers affective uptake, and deictic realignment that abstracts situated voices into circulable identities. These interventions determine not only what testimonies say but what they do affectively, that is, where emotions stick, how they circulate, and what responses they elicit. Extending Ahmed's framework, the article introduces resemiotization as a key mechanism regulating both the intensity and direction of affective flow. Resemiotization refers to how translated testimonies are progressively recontextualized across multiple representational modes: reporter narration, paraphrased translations, direct quotations, and video segments with subtitles or voice-over. Each mode recalibrates the emotional weight of suffering, creating an affective rhythm that orchestrates circulation. This multimodal orchestration directs affect toward humanitarian empathy and relief rather than toward political critique or sustained engagement with systemic violence.
These affective economies unfold alongside a process of testimonial containment, whereby politically charged narratives are recast in the emotionally resonant language of humanitarian suffering. In plainer terms, the testimonies prioritize subjects’ emotional fragility and social vulnerability over sustained critique of war and occupation. Palestinian witnesses are positioned as passive victims requiring humanitarian intervention rather than as political subjects articulating claims to justice, resistance, or sovereignty. This containment operates through various mechanisms: fragmentary use of translation that strips testimonies of broader context, omission of appeals to collective responsibility, and diffusion of agency in describing structural violence. The result is affective visibility without political force, where grief becomes felt while the grievances that underlie it are diluted.
The study demonstrates material consequences of these affective economies. Journalists, mothers, and children who dominate media coverage receive medical evacuation and humanitarian assistance, their affective visibility rendering them eligible for international response. Meanwhile, other victims remain less visible within these prevailing economies of empathy. This selective visibility reveals how affect functions as a biopolitical force: global media determines whose suffering becomes visible, which emotions are amplified, and which are suppressed, thereby structuring access to life-sustaining resources and reinforcing hierarchies of whose lives matter.
Overall, this study contributes to repositioning affect from a marginal concern in Translation Studies to a central mechanism through which power operates in global media. The framework applied here provides analytical tools for examining how translations orient audiences emotionally and politically, determining which suffering elicits response and which recedes into invisibility. The implications extend beyond this case study: understanding how translation constructs affective hierarchies is essential for interrogating the global circulation of conflict narratives and for recognizing the politics embedded in seemingly humanitarian representations. It was noted that translation participates in producing the conditions under which certain lives become grievable while others remain unrecognized. This insight establishes affect as constitutive of how global media determines whose voices merit hearing and whose suffering warrants intervention.
