In what follows, Baker’s (2006) approach to the translation of discourse of conflict will be described in a more detailed way as Baker in Translation and Conflict (2006) provides an integrative, fully developed framework for the analysis of political discourse. Such a description can serve as a potential model for the description of the features translated political texts display. In fact, Baker (2006) restricts her approach to narratives only and does not rely very heavily on text linguistic findings. Even so, similarly to the approach of the present undertaking, Baker’s (2006) approach is multidisciplinary in nature and is based on several theories including Somers and Gibson (1994) as well as Bruner (1991).

Baker’s (2006) starting point is the premise that political conflicts and the resolution of such conflicts in today’s globalised world, as a rule, stretch over national boundaries and thus inevitably involve translation and interpretation activities. According to Baker (2006), power is present exclusively in situations in which a party or parties are forced to act contrary to their wills and interests. Conflicts, Baker (2006, p. 1) asserts, evolve when parties of opposing interests intend to “undermine each other because they have incompatible goals, competing interests, or fundamentally different values”.

By integrating theories of translators’ attitudes towards consenting to or denying the reproduction of ideologies contained in narratives for translation, theories of the conscious perception of texts’ ideological content as well as theories concerning the assessment of the effectiveness of such narratives, Baker (2006) wishes to demonstrate that translation itself can either function as a tool in the hands of politics by creating one single truth and enforcing a given social and political order on citizens or, quite the contrary, can be used as a tool for fighting against such manipulation and corruption of texts.

Baker (2006) intends to provide a framework for exploring how translators and interpreters, through text production, contribute to or resist the creation and promotion of politically-charged narratives. By adopting a standpoint assumed in social and communication theory, Baker (2006, p. 3) defines narrative (or story) as a linguistic realisation of sequential events of “everyday stories we live by” and later, relying on Fisher’s (1987) claim of all human communication essentially being a narrative, extends her definition to incorporate practically every type of discourse. This broad definition allows for the investigation of several genres of discourse in a very diverse range of media.

As far as the possibilities for manipulating narratives in the translation process are concerned, Baker (2006), on the basis of Somers and Gibson (1994), depicts temporality, relationality, causal emplotment and selective appropriation as factors affecting the reception of narratives. Such instances of manipulation are common in mediatised communication and in translations transmitted by the mass media. Below Baker’s (2006) concepts will be explored in more detail.

Not necessarily portraying a true-to-life sequencing of events, temporality is the subjective, person-specific interpretation and ordering of the sequences of events contained in a narrative, created through an individual’s perception of such events. It is temporality of narratives that allows translators to interpret the textual material and logical implications contained in the text. Altering the sequencing of events, for instance as a result of translation, can have different implications in the target language text from those surfacing in the source text.

Relationality refers to the interrelatedness of events within a narrative: events have to constitute one single narrative. Furthermore, every event of a certain narrative must be interpreted in the light of other events of the given narrative as a whole. Translation is of key importance here as, for instance, the choice of certain lexical items in the target language text can trigger associations of certain narratives that are possibly different from the narrative associations of the source language community. This feature seems easy to be utilised for political reasons (e.g. for war propaganda) in case well-selected lexis is used that evokes references to well-established public narratives of political agendas.

Carrying also ethical implications, causal emplotment entails the significance of events in narratives, and is connected to the fact that narratives do not merely list events but “weight and explain” them (Baker, 2006, p. 67) in terms of the interpretation and evaluation of events, motifs, etc., thus providing a moral reading of the narrative. Through translation, the weighting of events can be changed to produce deliberately altered patterns of causal emplotment in the target language text.

The last factor in Baker’s (2006) theory affecting the reception of narratives, selective appropriation, denotes the conscious or subconscious processes during the creation of a narrative through which certain events get included whereas others get excluded from the final version of the narrative. This, in the large scale, in terms of translation, extends to the choices of what narratives of the source culture (i.e. narratives about which events) get translated. This selection, in the hands of politics, might easily contribute to the creation of false images or, in worse cases, to the creation of enemy cultures through acts of deliberate appropriation, i.e. purposeful selection of events along certain ideologies or political purposes (cf. selective appropriation above). Baker’s (2006) approach is revealing and exemplary in a way that is shows that power, ideology and politics related translation research must be multidisciplinary and based on interrelated theories.

With reference to the textual features of target texts, Baker (2006) identifies translation as an act involving possible alterations in the features of the resulting target text. The aim of altering certain features of target texts can be to renegotiate the features of a given narrative “to produce a politically charged narrative in the target context” (Baker, 2006, p. 105) as a means of constructing a modified, influenced reality for receptors through “strategic moves that are consciously initiated in order to present a [social, political or other] movement or a particular position within a certain perspective” (Baker, 2006, p. 106). Baker (2006) terms this practice framing.

Baker (2006) explores four different ways of framing selecting from among the endless methods available, and describes the potential uses of such means in translation. The first method of framing is termed temporal and spatial framing and involves no alterations in the text for translation itself but achieves its effect by the careful selection of a suitable text for translation and by embedding such a text “in a temporal and spatial context that accentuates the narrative it depicts and encourages receptors to establish links between it and current narratives” (Baker, 2006, p. 112). This practice is capable of exerting political influence despite the fact that the events of the narrative of the source text may actually be contained within an absolutely different temporal and spatial setting.

An especially common way of framing that appears in the translation of literary pieces is selective appropriation of textual material, which also has possible political implications. In this case, omissions from or additions to the original text are effected in order to “suppress, accentuate or elaborate particular aspects of a narrative encoded in the source text or utterance, or aspects of the larger narrative(s) in which it [the given narrative] is embedded” (Baker, 2006, p. 114). This act can happen either consciously or unconsciously and may well serve political purposes.

Another way of framing is by labelling. Labelling in this context denotes the practice of using “a lexical item, term or phrase to identify a person, place, group, event or any other key element in a narrative” (Baker, 2006, p. 122), given that such names embody particular viewpoints, beliefs or political commitments of a community. The fourth method of framing is termed repositioning of participants. This denotes rearranging the hierarchical positions of the characters of the narrative and the receptors of the narrative through altering partly the socio-linguistic features of the participants’ speech and partly other features used for such participants’ linguistic identification and characterisation. This also creates space for political manipulation through translation.

As a summary, it can be concluded that Baker’s (2006) theoretical framework takes account of several contextual and intertextual features as well as discusses several instances and means of (possible) political manipulation but does not rely on theories to pinpoint exact textual realisations of such instances of manipulation. Baker rather explains textual phenomena in their social, cultural and political context. We are of the opinion that for the sake of objectivity the analysis of political manipulation in translated texts must include the pinpointing of textual elements capable of manipulation, rather than providing solely the social, cultural and political contexts of these texts as a mere backdrop. At the same time, Baker (2006) restricts the proposed approach exclusively to one text type: narratives. As the texts to be analysed in the current research are argumentative texts, other theoretical frameworks will also be described in an attempt to find theories that will be more suitable for the current research purposes.

Concerning hybridity in translation, Schäffner (2001), in the context of international translation practice, explores the ways hybrid texts come about through translation process. Hybrid texts are the result of conscious, deliberate decisions on the part of the translator, which show unusual, strange textual features in the target culture and yet fulfil their intended purpose in the communicative situation in which they exist. The reason for this strangeness of target texts is that the genre of the source text does not exist in the target culture and, consequently, there are no model texts that could guide translators. With reference to political discourse, Schäffner (2001) notes that one reason why hybrid texts can come about is globalisation, as internationalisation potentially facilitates the dissemination of source genres (possibly unknown) in target language cultures. Through the use of contrastive text typological analysis, it is concluded that hybrid texts often display textual features that clash with the existing norms in the target language. This could possibly allow for the introduction of socially unaccepted/unacceptable concepts in the target culture and thus play a role in power games and political persuasion.

Based on the studies detailed above, it can be concluded that translation can purposefully be used for political manipulation. With a view to this, the analysis of any translated text must extend to contemporary social, cultural, political and ideological features. This is exactly what Critical Discourse Analysis can offer in a systematised way (cf. Section 4.5). Let us finally describe the only traceable trend in Translation Studies that incorporates Critical Discourse Analysis: critical discourse awareness in Translation Studies.