Translation and Ideology: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Chomsky’s “Media Control” and its Arabic Translation

Abstract

There are many factors that influence the translators while translating a text. Amongst these factors is the notion of ideology transmission through the translated texts. This paper is located within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It investigates the notion of ideology with particular use of critical discourse analysis. The purpose is to highlight the relationship between language and ideology in translated texts. It also aims at discovering whether the translator’s socio-cultural and ideology constraints influence the production of his/her translations.
As a mixed research method study, the corpus consists of two different Arabic translated versions of the English book “Media Control” by Noam Chomsky. The micro-level contains the qualitative stage where detailed description and comparison -contrastive and comparative- analysis will be provided. The micro-level analysis should include the lexical items along with the grammatical items (passive verses. active, nominalisation vs. de-nominalisation, moralisation and omission vs. addition). In order to have more reliable and objective data, computed frequencies of the ideological significance occurrences along with percentage and Chi-square formula were conducted through out the data analysis stage which then form the quantitative part of the current study. The main objective of the mentioned data analysis methodologies is to find out the dissimilarity between the proportions of the information obtained from the target texts (TTs) and their equivalent at the source text (ST).
The findings indicts that there are significant differences amongst the two TTs in relation to the word choices including the lexical items and the other syntactic structure compared by the ST. These significant differences indicate some ideological transmission through translation process of the two TTs. Therefore, and to some extent, it can be stated that the differences were also influenced by the translators’ socio-cultural and ideological constraints.