The impact of power on translation of news stories

Abstract

Translation has always undergone the impact of various metalinguistic factors which impose their impact during the process of translation and rendering its final linguistic product. News stories or better to say political discourses are among those linguistic materials that more than other textual materials undergo the impact of factors such as ideology. Not being aware of such discursive practices leads the so-called translator to suffice to linguistic substitutions without observing imbedded intentions. For the purpose of this study through a qualitative type of research and based on critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach for textual analysis and following Tymoczko’s concept of power (2002) in translation this study aimed to scrutinize the impact of power on Persian translations of different pieces of news stories in English in 2012. The corpus consists of some pieces of English news stories in worldwide news agencies (namely, Reuters, Washington Post, New York Post, and Forbes) about Iran’s nuclear program. Results of the study showed that ideology is the very important stimulus which can control and direct the purpose of the news stories being translated from English to Persian and reveal its impact in a desired way as news stories for target audience.