The Translator’s Ideology: A Study of Three Persian Translations of George Orwell’sNineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract

AbstractThe ideology and worldviews of a community may be shifted and modified through social changes brought about by political upheavals. In a country like Iran, the Islamic revolution (1979/80) has played a major role in re-shaping the ideology of the governing body which among many other things involves modifications in the language policy. After the revolution, Persian speakers were encouraged to be more conservative in their use of language. As a result, those who tended to produce discourse which was more conservative and Islam-oriented became more popular and respected among the Iranian people. Ideology is one of the major factors which influences the manipulation of language use in translation. Prefaces and introductions which form the paratexts to a translated product often contain expressions of a translator’s ideology, and this usually manifests itself in the translation product. This study aims to describe the ideological impact of the social situation both in the pre- and post-revolutionary era in Iran on translations of George Orwell’s famous political novel,Nineteen Eighty-Four(1949) into Persian. This study will, therefore, compare the prefaces in three Persian translations ofNineteen Eighty-Fourwhich were produced before and after the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution. The three Persian translations are by Mehdi Bahremand (1976), Zhila Sazegar (1980) and Saleh Hosseini (1982). This study employs Farahzad’s (2012) second dimension of the three-dimensional translation criticism model i. e. paratextual analysis alongside Lefevere’s (1992) theory of manipulation to investigate some of the lexical differences that manifest themselves in the pre-and post-revolutionary Persian translations ofNineteen Eighty-Fourwhich reflect the personal ideologies of the three Persian translators as explicitly or implicitly expressed in their prefaces.