Ferdows Aghagolzadeh; Ailin Firoozian
Abstract
Extended Abstract
1. Introduction
Without a doubt, people communicate their feelings and thoughts through discourse and texts. Every text is formed based on some metalinguistic variables including, culture, history, relations of power, politics, norms, and rules of the society. The author is supposed ...
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Extended Abstract
1. Introduction
Without a doubt, people communicate their feelings and thoughts through discourse and texts. Every text is formed based on some metalinguistic variables including, culture, history, relations of power, politics, norms, and rules of the society. The author is supposed to organize a text considering all these mentioned variables and the translator is expected to take them into account while translating the same text (Wodak & Meyer, 2001). Hence, it can be inferred that the metalinguistic variables find their reflection in the language (the choice of words) both the author and translator employ and therefore, the trace of ideology can be found in all texts (Basnett, 2002; Schäffner, 2009). Moreover, the translator conveys his intended meaning to the reader by clever manipulation of words and structures (Tymoczko & Gentzler, 2002; Mason, 2010).
Considering all mentioned points and despite various ideological discourse structures proposed by Van Dijk (2004), Iranian researchers paid scant attention to the study of style and rhetoric as compared to other discourse structures introduced by Van Dijk (2004). Furthermore, regarding the reciprocal relationship between culture and language and the fact that Persian language is occupied with literary devices for long time, writers of different types of texts especially literary texts make use of these sources. Concerning the paucity of research in this realm, the chief purpose of this paper is to apply the Van Dijk (2004)‘s model as the starting point for critical discourse analysis of Persian political translated texts to arrive at deeper understanding of how political translators use these two discourse structures and their strategies in order to impose their intended ideologies. In addition, we try to uncover the ideological reasons of political translators in applying these two discourse structures.
2. Methodology
To collect data, a corpus of 300 English paragraphs and their translated counterparts in Persian were accurately scrutinized sentence by sentence. All these paragraphs were related to the recently important political issues in Iran which were translated into Persian by translators. This corpus is taken from a comprehensive collection of newspapers, websites, theses, magazines, recorded deals, and so on. To achieve the aim of this study, all sentences in the 300 paragraphs were read meticulously and critically, concentrating on each phrase, clause, and sentence separately and in conjunction with the neighboring phrases, clauses, and sentences. They were searched for the strategies of style and rhetoric; the strategy of style includes lexicalization and rhetoric is composed of 7 strategies which are simile, number game, irony, repetition, hyperbole, dramatization, and metaphor. Subsequently, one example was given for each strategy.
3. Discussion
The analysis of results exhibited that among 300 paragraphs taken into account, 50 instances of lexicalization were found; the reasons of applying such strategies were not the same throughout these paragraphs translated by different translators. The researchers cited three reasons behind making use of lexicalization which are as follows: 1) ideological lexicalization 2) stylistic lexicalization 3) complementary lexicalization (i.e., the translator resorts to the use of two strategies simultaneously, one of which is lexicalization, to express his ideology more effectively). The complementary lexicalization was classified into three groups: a) lexicalization and generalization b) lexicalization and euphemism c) lexicalization and nominalization. This finding is in line with the Ideological Square of Van Dijk (2004). Furthermore, the finding showed that the occurrences of the strategies of rhetoric were just equal to 7.
4. Conclusion
The results indicated that the frequency of employing rhetoric strategies was much less than the use of the style strategy. This would mean that the translators enjoyed more tendency to apply lexicalization strategy than the rhetoric ones. As a matter of fact, rhetoric strategies may embrace literary devices, the abundance of which can be apparently seen in Persian language and culture. However, it was found that Persian translators showed less tendency to use rhetoric strategies to reflect their own ideology. This result may lend support to the fact that political texts are mostly written in direct and straight manner and as a result, translators would prefer to use lexicalization strategy more frequently than rhetoric strategies.
Every scientific enquiry opens new directions for further research. Future directions for research in this area would be to survey political discourses in other countries and compare their results with the results of current study. Since this study focused on written discourse, it is engrossing to conduct another study to deal with spoken discourse.
