Ideology, change & power in literature and society: A critical discourse analysis of literary translations

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to assess the translation quality of a political literary text, i.e. Orwell’s Animal Farm, from the viewpoint of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and explore the degree to which ideology and power relations play major roles in the two Persian translations. Adopting the CDA framework of Van Dijk under Lefevere’s notion of ideology, change and power in literature and society, this paper examined two different English-Persian translations of an excerpt from Animal Farm, The Seven Commandments, to pinpoint the interwoven relation between ideology, change and power and translation. To discover the impact of these phenomena on each other, a detailed contrastive/comparative study at the micro/macro-level in terms of fore/back-grounding mechanisms was conducted to examine, describe and subsequently interpret the patterns in the source text (ST) and its target texts (TTs). The findings of the study illuminated that too significant ideological distortions and manipulation were made in the translations to consider them as adequate translations.