“Guardian Claimed in a Report…”: Ideology and Translation in Iranian Online Media
Ali Attaran
1
(
ALLAMEH TABATABAI UNIVERSITY
)
Ferdows Aghagolzadeh
2
(
Department of Linguistics, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
)
Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, Ideology, Iranian politics, Media, News translation,
Abstract :
This study aims to identify ideologically-laden translation patterns in an Iranian news website. The corpus consists of 40 ST-TT pairs of English news and their Persian translations by Tabnak, a ‘Principlist’ Iranian website. The source texts originate from Western media, mostly based in Europe and the United States, in addition to Israel, and relate to the main points of conflict between Iran and the West such as Iran’s nuclear program. Relying on concepts and taxonomies introduced by Critical Discourse Analysis scholars, the authors examined which ideological shifts had taken place and which had a higher frequency. The study revealed that omission of Our bad actions/properties, lexical manipulation, and omission of Their good actions/properties were the most frequent shifts. The study explains how these ideological manipulations relate to the wider sociopolitical context, i.e. the relations between Iran and the West, and the political viewpoint of Tabnak as an Iranian news source with a conservative bent. It also provides suggestion for rigorous application of CDA framework in Translation Studies.
