Role of Ideology in Translating Political Texts in French Media

The importance of the linguistic, political, and social context in understanding and receiving the text is undeniable. In accordance with the theory of linguistic context, syntagmatic relations, paradigmatic relations, and syntactic structure participate in the formation of meaning. In order to suggest their own ideology or the desired message, translators can use various strategies during the translation process, causing transformations in the context and consequently in the meaning of a text. The aim of this study was to investigate how ideology influences translating political texts in the news media. To this end, Dr. Hassan Rouhani's speech on Iran's decision to reduce its obligations under the nuclear agreement was chosen as the source text, and its translation into French was analyzed, according to the theory of linguistic context. The case study of these French translations which were presented by a weekly, three newspapers, and two news websites, belonging to a variety of political parties from the far left to the far right, reveals interesting points about the quantity and quality of the effects of ideology and political policy of the media on the translation of a specific text or speech. The findings of the study suggest that through lexical choice and syntactic structures, the political inclination of each media often lead to transformations in the text, including suppression or attenuation, which in turn give rise to a text in the target language whose message and objective would be different from or even contradictory to those of the original text.