A CDA Approach to the Representation of Cultures and Ideologies through Translated Political Texts: A Case Study of "All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror" by S. Kinzer

Abstract

Translation, as a social and linguistic phenomenon, had been investigated from various viewpoints by scholars
with different backgrounds. This paper aims at investigating the ideological impacts of the process of translation
and its consequences on the representation of ideologies and cultures. In pursuing this goal, Critical Discourse
Analysis (CDA) was found to be an accommodating tool. The theoretical structure of this research is based upon
Fairclough's (1989, 1995) & Farahzad’s (2007) framework. The corpus used for analysis in this research is a
book and its corresponding Persian translation. The case study of this research is All the Shah's Men: An
American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer (2003) translated by Shahryar Khavvajian.
Examining the text and its translation from the perspectives of macro level & micro level illuminated the fact that
the translator employed different devices to change the ideological positioning of the source texts and deviate the
readers from the route they might have taken through reading the ST toward the one they presumed it was more
ideologically efficient regarding the community the book was translated for. In other words, the power and
ideologies have clearly influenced the translation, comparing the source text with the target one which is
completely diverged as the situation, policies and preferred politics asked for. Translated texts appeared in a
context different from that of the source texts. A text is produced in the context of "Self" and is translated in the
setting of "Other" or at least for "Other"