Translating Ideational Meaning in Political Texts: A Systemic Functional Perspective

Abstract

Political texts are unlike other texts as they ''are a part and/or the results of political events, and they are historically and culturally produced in which politics is the main subject matter (Schaffner, 2001:133). Transferring meaning of such text types in the translation process is difficult for translators due to specific terminologies, expressions and linguistic structure. Regarding meaning, Systemic Functional Linguistics (henceforth SFL) identifies three kinds of meaning of language, namely, Ideational, Interpersonal and Textual. The major focus of this research is the Ideational meaning. From this perspective, this paper applies SFL to analyze and discuss the patters of equivalence and shift that are employed to transfer the Ideational meaning of journalistic texts, political texts in particular, in translating from English into Kurdish. With a corpus of 8 pairs of English source texts and their Kurdish translations, the analysis shows that a number of patterns are used to reproduce the source clausal Ideational meaning in the target texts. Finally, the study ends with the main findings and conclusions.