A Comparative Study of Fars News Agency’s Persian Translation of Political News Based on Van Dijk’s Socio-Cognitive Approach

News stories or better to say political discourses are among those linguistic materials that more than other textual materials undergo the impact of factors such as ideology. Drawing on Teun van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach, the present paper attempts to investigate certain ideological aspects of news headlining in an English-Persian translation context. To this end, 100 pieces of the recent political news (from 2016 to 2017) were collected. When all the data had been collected, the original texts – political news – were studied and analyzed along with their translations into Persian in order to identify the implications of translators choices in terms of CDA. The next stage was discussing the results in terms of CDA. In this final stage the researchers attempted to reveal the ideological position -identity- of the translator in his/her decision making. The results of the study were significantly revealing; out of 100 pieces, 79 news items were directly indicative of the ideology and identity of the translator. These translation strategies are typically realized through the purposeful application of linguistic expressions (both at lexical and grammatical levels) or non-linguistic elements (such as images, photos and graphic drawings).

Keywords:

translation , ideology , us/them polarization , critical discourse analysis (CDA) , sociocognitive model