Interactive Incentives in Di- and/or Con-vergence in Translation: Evaluating Representations of the ‘Other’ in Institutional Translations of Political Discourses

The significance of the present study is that it emphasizes the decisive role of linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive parameters in the occurrence of di- and/or con-vergence in translation. The present study aims at evaluating discursive representations of ‘Other’ in institutional translations of political discourses. This paper strives to probe into the underlying factors and incentives in the rise of di- and/or con-vergence in the source and target texts as construing the ‘Others’ and their emerging threats. Employing Proximisation Theory, we embarked upon analyzing 20 instances of the Iranian Supreme Leader’s speeches in which he characterizes the ‘Other’ and construes their threats against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Our analyses of data indicated that the institutional translations of the original speeches enjoy maximum con-vergence with the source texts even though there was only meager di-vergence between source and target texts in modal and aspectual structures. However, the reported instances of di-vergence brought about less significant semantic and conceptual differences in construing the threats. Furthermore, regarding the underpinning factors and incentives for the emergence of di- and/or con-vergence, we argued that there was a strong dialectic relationship between linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, such as the subject position of the text producer, the translating institution and objectives of translating, providing a base ground for the translator to follow divergence or convergence.