Transmission of Ideology through Translation: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Orwell’s “Coming up for Air” and its Persian Translation

The present Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)-based study was an attempt to probe into the manipulation of ideologies in translations. The researcher employed a CDA approach, based on Fairclough (1989) to investigate the probable impacts of different ideologies prevailing in separate socio-historical situations in the translations of the novel “Coming up for Air”. To carry out this analytical descriptive corpus-based study, two translations of the novel in different socio-historical conditions in Iran were examined both at micro and macro levels. At micro-level, the lexical choices and translator’s strategies for rendering them were analyzed and at macro level the macro features such as prefaces and footnotes in the translated books were studied. The results of this research showed that both translators used the strategies such as synonymy, hyponymy, antonymy, overwording, formal and informal words, euphemism and omission respectively. The difference between the percentages of the strategies, they used for translating ideological lexicon was not significantly different at the probability levels of 95% and 99%. So, at the micro level, there was a harmony among the strategies that the translators have applied for translating ideological lexicons. However, at the macro level regarding preface, footnote Roshanfekr (2011) by applying75.5% of English names in footnotes attempted to preserve the ideological aspects of the writer while Razavi(1984) used English names just 23.11% and rendered footnotes with Persian explanation proved the translator’s lack of knowledge or interest in giving appropriate information in this regard. Roshanfekr (2011) presented a preface with numerous positive and supportive ideas about the author and his skill in writing a novel but Razavi (1984), the other translator, did not write preface on his translation and did not give any idea about the author and story to his readers may be due to the political situation and the restrictions of those days in Iran, such as war, Economic sanctions and cultural conflicts with the western world. Therefore the analysis of the data proved that there was no neutral use of language and translation.

text, critical discourse analysis, ideology, micro and macro level