Applying Critical Discourse Analysis in Translation of Political Speeches and Interviews

Abstract

From the ancient times, language has been using as an ingenious device for transmission of ideology and for manipulation of the audience minds by those who have been in power. As Kress in Van Dijk (1985: 29) states, "Ideologies find their clearest articulation in language. Hence, a powerful way of examining ideological structure is through the examination of language". Adopting Critical Discourse Analysis with particular emphasis on the framework of Fairclough (1989) and utilizing the notions of SFL by Holliday (1985), the present investigation is an attempt to shed light on the relationship between language and ideology involved in translation in general, and more specifically, to uncover the underlying ideological assumptions invisible in the texts, both source text (ST) and target text (TT), and consequently ascertain whether or not translators’ ideologies are imposed in their translations. The corpus consisted of President Bush speeches during the years 2005 till 2008 about the nuclear program of Iran. The data consist of ST (in English) in the form of a political interviews and TTs in the form of 8 translations in Persian. The obtained results proved the fact that the application of CDA for the analysis of the ST and TT helps the translator to become aware of the genre conventions, social and situational context of the ST and TT, and outlines the formation of power and ideological relations on the text-linguistic level.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n1p35