A Critical Discourse Analysis of Political Text Translation:Transmission of Ideology and Power

This research is concerned with the use of manipulation strategies by the translators of political texts for thetransmission of their ideology. It aims at examining the extent to which translators used manipulationstrategies for the transmission of their own ideology and to testify the significant difference between theprovided translations. The study set out to employ both a quantitative and a qualitative approach toanalyze the data. A CDA approach, based on Van Dijk (۲۰۰۴), was adopted to conduct this research. Thecorpus consisted of Secretary of States, John Kerry's remarks during the years ۲۰۱۰ till ۲۰۱۵ about thenuclear program of Iran. The data included ST in English in the form of a political interviews and pressconferences and TTs in the form of Persian translations provided by Iranian translation media staff andWestern translation media staff. The researcher used SPSS software to analysis data. Researcher examinedfrequency and percentage of applied manipulation strategies in the translations provided by Iranian andWestern official media. The obtained results showed that translators made use of certain manipulationstrategies for the sake of ideological ploy and the percentage and order of the applied manipulationstrategies were different in each medium. The results confirmed that there is a significant difference betweenthe translations provided by Iranian translation media staff and Western translation media staff. The findingswere interpreted to have implications for syllabus designers as well as translation students and teachers.

Keywords:

Discourse Analysis , political discourse , ideology , power , manipulation strategies