A Critical Discourse Analysis towards Persian Translation of Why Leaders Lie by John Mearsheimer Using Van Dijk’s Model

Translation plays a major role in communication of people with different languages, cultures, attitudes and etc. There are some factors in translating a text which influence the result of translation process, one of which is political ideology and the control factors which impose some limitations and give direction to the translator and the text being translated. This thesis attempted to investigate the ideological impacts on the process of translation and its consequences on the representation of ideologies in the Persian translation of Why Leaders Lie. To achieve this goal, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was applied as the theoretical framework of this research using Van Dijk’s Ideological Square Model through a qualitative method of research. The corpus used for the analysis in this research consisted of the book Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics and its corresponding Persian translation by Arash Farzad and Mohammad Heydari. Van Dijk’s Ideological Square Model has been selected to scrutinize the book. Positive self-presentation and negative others-presentation are two main discursive terms proposed by Van Dijk. Examining the text and its translation from two perspectives of Ideological Square Model proposed by Van Dijk illuminated the fact that the Persian translators have employed different devices to change the ideological positioning of the source texts and deviate the readers from the route they might have taken through reading the ST toward the one presumed as more ideologically efficient regarding the community the books they have translated for.

Keywords:

translation , language , ideology , political discourse , critical discourse analysis , ideological square model