Transmission of Ideology through Translation: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Chomsky's " Media Control" and its Persian Translations

Among factors that might manipulate translators’ mind while producing a textis the notion of ideology transmission through text or talk. Adopting CriticalDiscourse Analysis (CDA) with particular emphasis on the framework of VanDijk (1999), the present investigation is an attempt to shed light on therelationship between language and ideology involved in translation in general,and more specifically, to uncover the underlying ideological assumptionsinvisible in the texts, both source text (ST) and target text (TT), andconsequently ascertain whether or not translators’ ideologies are imposed intheir translations.The corpus consists of the full text of two different Persian translations ofthe book Media Control by Noam Chomsky, written in English. In a qualitativephase, a detailed contrastive/comparative study at the micro-level in terms offore/back-grounding mechanisms including explanation of lexical items anddominant grammatical metaphors (passive vs. active, nominalization vs. denominalization,addition vs. omission, and modalization) was conducted toexamine, describe and subsequently interpret the patterns in the English sourcetext and its Persian translated versions. In order to make the research datainterpretations as objective as possible, having computed frequencies ofideologically significant instances, and percentages, Chi-square formula wasapplied to find out any difference between proportions of informationextracted from the target text concerning their fore/back-grounding and theirpositions against the source text as well as to test the research null hypothesis,which was consequently rejected.The findings reveal that there are significant changes made by the twotranslators, either intentionally or unintentionally, in their selection of lexicalitems and syntactic structures in comparison to those in the source text. Thefindings of the study also show that many distortions or transformationsbetween the original and the two translated versions were not only arbitrary,but also ideologically encoded in the texts, with specific purposes and functions.