Manipulation of original ideology through translation: A discourse-based translation quality assessment of speeches

Abstract

The main focus of this paper is on speeches in literary discourse as the superb ideological displays of propaganda as well as their translations for having an enormous capacity for ideological manipulation. In this paper, the only present English-Azarbaijani Turkish translation of Squealer’s speech from Orwell’s Animal Farm was discoursally analyzed based on House’s revised translation quality assessment (TQA) model. According to this model, speeches as propaganda in literary texts must be translated overtly to meet the standards of an adequate translation. Of the main criteria of an overt translation are co-activating the original discourse world and being equivalent at the levels of text, register, and genre. With respect to covertly and overtly erroneous errors, the findings of the study demonstrated that enormous ideological distortions and manipulation were carried out in the Turkish translation. Therefore, the translation was a covert and inadequate one. Moreover, the social effect the source and target texts’ readerships receive would be radically different from each other. Finally, some implications and suggestions for further studies were proposed.