To be fast you shouldn't nest the object (which acts as a dictionary) in an array, but just use an object:
var mapDesktop2Mobile = {"news":"panorama", "local":"someothercat"};
At that point you can get the value with:
mapDesktop2Mobile["news"]
If you need a dictionary of more complex objects you can use the value of a UNIQUE property as the key, much like this:
var complexDictionary = {
"key01" : { "name" : "key01", "property1" : 1, "property2" : 4 },
"key02" : { "name" : "key02", "property1" : 2, "property2" : 3 },
"key03" : { "name" : "key03", "property1" : 3, "property2" : 2 },
"key40" : { "name" : "key40", "property1" : 4, "property2" : 1 }
};
The fact that you repeat the property as a key should be of no concern, you won't allocate much more memory and leverage the full speed of the VM implementation (mostly with hashes, buckets and native platform code -- you can't hope to get any faster than that).