Document Type : علمی - پژ‍وهشی

Authors

1 Damghan University

2 Tarbiat Modares University

Abstract

Extended Abstract

Introduction

Although it is believed that language is the sheer truth (Cook, 2003), this fact should not be ignored that language specifically the socio-political discourse is sometimes used to conceal the truth and conveys the purport the way that affects people and persuade them to accept the untruth. The translator who is responsible for transferring the content that in turn, includes meta-language elements such as culture, history, politics, authority, and different ideologies from the source language (SL) to the target language (TL) and by manipulating and altering the linguistic forms of source language, he affects the readers' schools of thoughts and feelings and finally lead them to a certain ideology (Mason, 2010; Penycook, 2004). therefore, it can be said that in a translation process, the translator can convey the source of language's content to the target language the way he likes by applying diverse strategies and techniques, consciously or unconsciously (Schäffner, 2007, 2009).
As far as the way a socio-political translator’s choice of any of the linguistic forms considerably influences the reader’s mind, the research aims to augment the precision of translations done by students of English translation from different social classes, to improve people's critical thinking, to find and analyze manipulative syntactic structures of socio-political texts, and to express translators’ ideology or the dominant ideology of their society.
 

Theoretical Framework

The framework of this paper is based on critical discourse analysis and socio-cognitive Van Dijk’s approach (2004). His analytical method, suggest two levels of analysis: macro level and micro level. Macro-level is related to the analysis of meta-linguistic elements such as ideology. For investigating this level in this study, “ideological square” defined by Van Dijk (2004) will be used. The concept of this square based on polarization, designate the following dimensions:

Emphasizing our positive actions or properties
Mitigating their positive properties and actions
Emphasizing their negative properties and actions
Mitigating our negative properties and actions

Microstructure as another level is related to the analysis of the text in terms of linguistic forms. This research focuses on all syntactic strategies which might be applied by translators’ in order to represent their ideologies.

Methodology

Among approximately 600 texts collected from different written English socio-political content that were translated to Persian language and were limited to national, international or regional issues related to subjects about Iran, 250 utterances were selected for analyzing. These excerpts had the most obvious syntactic manipulation done by Persian translators. They were taken from written news, interviews, resolutions and the like from different sources such as websites, press, and magazines. Searching all syntactic strategies and manipulations, the Persian translators’ ideology were then challenged within CDA framework and Van Dijk’s theoretical pattern (2004). After that, Van Dijk’s ideological square was used to analyze how Our and Their actions and properties were polarized and how they were reflected in translation were examined. In the end, the frequency of the applied syntactic strategies was calculated.

Results and Discussion

In this part of the research according to Van Dijk’s theoretical pattern (2004), the frequency and percentage of each syntactic manipulations including eight strategies (word order, passivization, topicalization, nominalization, addition, deletion, modality and tense shift) which were used to manipulate the syntactic structures of English (ST) in order to convey Persian translator’s dominant or intended ideology, are excluded and analyzed.

Conclusion and Suggestions

The conclusions show that the syntactic strategies and manipulations do have a salient role in representing Persian translators’ ideologies in English written translated socio-political texts through the polarization of us and them. In other words, the effectiveness of syntax, manipulations, and changes made on syntactic structures and the Van Dijk’s theoretical pattern (2004) syntactic strategies could considerably echo the Persian translators’ ideologies in translated socio-political English discourses. Hence, studying these analyses clearly demonstrates that the major strategies or strategies used for emphasizing and mitigating actions in the content that Van Dijk explained in his ideological square has been significantly effective in justifying syntactic changes and the manipulations done by Persian translators. Also, comparing syntactic frequencies showed that the findings of the mostly applied strategies such as deletion and addition represent that among all such strategies, Persian translators pick the clearest and most direct way to express intended ideologies and hitherto, they have been trying to affect the meaning and the ideology of the target language indirectly. As far as the current research chose to study syntax among different discourse terms, studying other terms can show a more comprehensible picture of changes that represent the efforts translators have made to demonstrate beliefs, principles, personal and social culture through words, structures, and ideological meanings.

Keywords

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