The Interaction Between Socio-Cultural and Socio-Historical Issues: Exploring Ideology Through Grammatical Choices in The USA Presidential Debate and Its Persian Translation

The politicians need to use lexical means and grammatical choices to communicate their policies and express their ideologies, as a set of beliefs and attitudes controlling social practices, in political discourse as one of the most ideological oriented forms of text and talk. The current study attempted to explore the ideologies expressed by grammatical choices in the first presidential debate, held between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in ۲۰۱۶, and its Persian translation counterpart. To this end, Farahzad 's (۲۰۰۹) critical discourse analysis model, known as "translation criticism", was used to analyze grammatical choices employed in proto-text (American presidential debate) and its meta-text (Persian translation). The results revealed that such unmarked linguistic structures as declarative clauses, active voice construction, affirmative (positive) clauses were frequently employed in both source text and target text. Whereas three main tenses, past, present, and future, were used to show the relationship between the context of speech and context of speech production, the dominant verb tense was present tense and its main forms in both ST and TT. It was concluded that the translator did not tend to conform to the ideologies of ST; thus, linguistic distortion occurred in the process of translation because of following the TT norms and values. The results can be advantageous to the students of English translation to be aware of mismatch in verb tenses, differences in sentence construction, and socio-cultural issues that influence the clarity and precision of translation

Keywords:

Ideology , critical discourse analysis , political discourse , grammatical choices , debate