Mátyás Bánhegyi: The Effects of Politics and Ideology on the Translation of Argumentative Political Newspaper Articles
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Chapter 4: Translation and politics: Critical Discourse Analysis
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4.5 Van Dijk’s (1993, 1997, 2001, 2003) Critical Discourse Analysis
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4.5.1 Main tenets

4.5.1 Main tenets

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Based on Fairclough and Wodak’s (1997) description of the van Dijkian framework, the following eight main tenets lie behind van Dijk’s CDA (cf. van Dijk 2001).

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1. CDA addresses social problems. In fact, “CDA is the analysis of linguistic and semiotic aspects of social processes and problems” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997, p. 271). This implies that various fields of science are joined in CDA, which makes CDA interdisciplinary, combining diverse disciplinary perspectives in its analyses. Consequently, the focus is on joining social studies and linguistics. This is done on the basis that “[t]he key claim of CDA is that major social and political processes and movements have a partly linguistic-discursive character” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997, p. 271) and thus such social practices (ideology and power) and political processes are traceable in discourse.

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2. Power relations are discursive. As the previous tenet also suggests, CDA describes the “linguistic and discursive nature of social relations of power in contemporary societies. This is partly a matter of how power relations are exercised and negotiated in discourse” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997, p. 272). This suggests that power relations can be observed in discourse. Another relevant theoretical cornerstone for us now is connected to politics and power: this is what Fairclough and Wodak (1997, p. 272) term “the question of power over discourse”. This describes who has the power to speak to which audience. Such power is to be analysed with present and longer term relevance: what objectives such dominated discourse realises for those in power in the short and in the long run.

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3. Discourse constitutes society and culture. Van Dijk’s CDA claims that there is a dialectical relationship between discourse, society, culture and power. This practically means that “every instance of language use makes its own small contribution to reproducing and/or transforming society and culture, including power relations” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997, p. 273). Following Fairclough (Fairclough qtd. in Fairclough and Wodak 1997, p. 273), van Dijk’s CDA distinguishes three domains of social life that may be discursively constituted: representations, relations and identities. These are representations of the surrounding world, social relations holding between people and people’s social and personal identities, respectively. This means that discourse concurrently represents reality, constructs social relations and social identities as well as creates a unified picture of such reality, relations and identities within one single text. Consequently, word order, style, coherence and other properties of discourse may be described as language users’ attempts to actively construct and display social and cultural roles, identities and realities (van Dijk 1997).

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4. Discourse does ideological work. This suggests that ideologies represent and construct society by reproducing unequal relations of power (Fairclough and Wodak 1997). In this sense, in order to uncover ideological work, besides text analysis one must consider how texts are interpreted and received and must account for their social effects (Fairclough and Wodak 1997). Consequently, discourse has to be interpreted and explained in its social, cultural, historical context. This is especially so, as ideologies are implicit and are attached to “key words [such as freedom, law and order, etc.] which evoke but leave implicit sets of ideological assumptions” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997, p. 275), which thus go unnoticed and are taken for granted by receivers. CDA describes and accounts for such unnoticed and taken-for-granted notions.

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5. Discourse is historical. In this sense, “[d]iscourse is not produced without context and cannot be understood without taking the context into consideration” (Duranti and Goodvin qtd. in Fairclough and Wodak 1997, p. 276). In line with pragmatics, the interpretation of a text is only meaningful if its use in a specific discoursal situation is considered, if the cultural and ideological context of a text are recognized, and if it is known what past events the discourse relates to (Fairclough and Wodak 1997). Therefore, CDA takes the communicative situation, its features and intertextuality into account as well as interprets (inter)textual references and allusions.

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6. The link between text and society is mediated. In other words, CDA attempts to establish connections between social and cultural structures and processes, on the one hand, and textual properties and features, on the other. In this sense, social and cultural structures are realized at the level of grammatical, lexical, etc. structures in discourse. This is especially notable with reference to changes in policies or in the dominant, mainstream culture as such changes are realized partly in changes in discourse and partly through the emergence of new genres or text types (Fairclough and Wodak 1997).

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7. Discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory. This is envisaged in a way that “[u]nderstanding takes place not through a tabula rasa, but against the background of emotions, attitudes and knowledge” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997, p. 278). That is, the audience’s emotional (emotions), formal (attitudes) and cognitive (knowledge-related) schemata (or mental representations) must be considered. In this respect, it is necessary to survey what mental representations the audience possesses when understanding an instance of discourse. In other words, the emotional, formal and cognitive context of texts must be investigated (Fairclough and Wodak 1997) so that the above schemata can be established. It must, at the same time, be noted that context analysis may be quite complex and can extend to a number of contextual features (van Dijk 1997).

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8. Discourse is a form of social action. Or put in another way: discourse will reproduce existing power relations: therefore CDA is inevitably “a socially committed scientific paradigm” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997, p. 280) sensitive to all forms of power abuse and dominance.
 

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These principles perfectly resound with the principles behind the current research. In the following points, it will be described in what way and to what extent the above tenets are applicable to the current research in Translation Studies. For the sake of easier reference, the numbers indicate the tenets formulated by van Dijk.
 

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1. CDA addresses social problems: the translations under scrutiny within the scope of the present undertaking relate to major social and political processes and movements through their discursive character as the source newspaper articles mark an important political cornerstone in the Hungarian political life of the year 2008 (cf. Section 7.3).

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2. Power relations are discursive: translation will help establish or combat power relations established and reproduced through discourse (cf. Baker 2006). Translated political texts can either further contribute to the maintenance of the hegemony of the ruling elite or can fight against such hegemony by creating texts that potentially undermine this hegemony. Power relations will be examined in connection with source and target texts.

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3. Discourse constitutes society and culture: as translated texts are a kind of discourse, target texts constitute society and culture. Translation, through the texts it creates and by way of the reconstruction of reality, social relations and social identities, is capable of reproducing or transforming existing social relations including power just like any other text.

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4. Discourse does ideological work: as translated texts are a kind of political discourse, target texts of a political nature are also capable of doing ideological work. Translation may be a means of reproducing ideology and unequal relations of social and political power.

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5. Discourse is historical: translation cannot exist without the social context of translation, which is historically rooted. As the source and consequently the target texts relate to past events (cf. Section 7.3), the historical context must be accounted for.

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6. The link between text and society is mediated through translation. As translation is also discourse, it will reproduce social and cultural structures and processes through rendered texts. Consequently, social and cultural structures will be reflected by translated texts. This means that textual analysis must address the actual social and cultural structures and their presentation in target texts.

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7. Discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory: it is our intention to make the analyses of source and target texts interpretative and explanatory by providing relevant background information about (the schemata held by) text producers.

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8. Discourse is a form of social action. Translation, especially with the internationalisation of politics, is becoming – at both international and national levels – increasingly socially committed. Thus, translation produces texts that exhibit current power relations thereby expressing the acceptance of such power relations textually or, alternatively, it produces texts that resist these power relations and textually express translators’ political resistance (cf. Baker 2006).
 
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