Competition of Discourses in Journalistic Translation: Diplomatic Negotiations in Focus

Abstract

We sought to understand whether, how, and why the translated journalistic texts related to the Iranian nuclear negotiations were manipulated. To this end, we monitored a news agency’s Webpage in a time span of 46 days that began 3 days before Almaty I nuclear talks and ended 3 days after Almaty II talks. Monitoring resulted in a corpus made up of 36 target texts plus their source texts. Data were, then, approached from the perspective of van Dijk’s sociocognitive theory of discourse and ideology. Findings indicated that the published texts in the name of translation, as Their voice, were exploited to emphasize in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. Linking the textual analysis to the context demonstrated that the manipulations might have intentionally been done so that the translations conformed to the narratives of resistance and independence prevailing in the country after the 1979 Revolution. Results seem to suggest that manipulated translation can be a more effective tool of manipulation because it is, most of the time, presented and accepted as proxy for what out-groups say.