Abstract
The main purpose of this paper is to assess the translation quality of a political literary text, i.e. Orwell’s Animal Farm, from the viewpoint of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and explore the degree to which ideology and power relations play major roles in the two Persian translations. Adopting the CDA framework of Van Dijk under Lefevere’s notion of ideology, change and power in literature and society, this paper examined two different English-Persian translations of an excerpt from Animal Farm, The Seven Commandments, to pinpoint the interwoven relation between ideology, change and power and translation. To discover the impact of these phenomena on each other, a detailed contrastive/comparative study at the micro/macro-level in terms of fore/back-grounding mechanisms was conducted to examine, describe and subsequently interpret the patterns in the source text (ST) and its target texts (TTs). The findings of the study illuminated that too significant ideological distortions and manipulation were made in the translations to consider them as adequate translations.
Highlights
Translation quality assessment is an approach that assists translators and translation researchers in pinpointing the quality of translated texts in order to enhance the quality of future translations especially with regard to literary translations
Focusing on the ideologies and power relations behind any lexical and grammatical choices in the source and target texts and considering the results, we explored and discovered the manipulation of the original ideologies and power relations through the discursive structures in the Persian translations
The analysis proved that certain lexical and grammatical items were added, omitted, and distorted, which points to the fact that the original sociopolitical ideology was dramatically manipulated in the translations
Summary
Translation quality assessment is an approach that assists translators and translation researchers in pinpointing the quality of translated texts in order to enhance the quality of future translations especially with regard to literary translations. Critical discourse analysis is used in translation research to illuminate to what extent translators’ mind is influenced by ideological considerations, which are coded and manifested in the translated texts. Texts, as they stand in society are not neutral; they are ideologically loaded. This study highlights the relationship between language and ideology, uncovers the invisible underlying ideological assumptions in the texts, and discovers to what extent the translators’ ideologies are imposed in their works In this respect, Lefevere’s notions of patron and patronage were included in order to prove the biased ideological approaches applied to the translations aiming at manipulating the poetics and ideology of the original. The cultural, sociopolitical and ideological constraint and considerations consciously or unconsciously lie behind each translator’s decision-making
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