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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4.5.2 Van Dijk’s CDA
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4.5.2.4 Theoretical links between discourse and society: Discourse–Society Interface
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4.5.2.4.2 Discourse–Society Interface: Context
4.5.2.4.2 Discourse–Society Interface: Context

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CDA claims to be a socially-based discourse approach, and thus studies and examines discourse in its social context (van Dijk 1997). Van Dijk consequently defines text and talk as situated or contextualised. In this light, Context denotes “some kind of environment or circumstances for an event, action or discourse [functioning] as a background, setting, surroundings, conditions or consequences” (van Dijk, 1997, p. 10) of such an instance of discourse. In other words, context refers to those society-related properties of the social situation that are relevant for the given discourse (van Dijk, 1997, p. 10) and consequently for the analysis of discourse. In van Dijk’s Interface, the broadest definition of context includes the following aspects:

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a) participants, who are part of the communicative event and the contextual conditions that vary according to the actual participants. This denotes the clarification of the participants and is based on the assumption that discourse structure varies as a function of participants (e.g. the way a piece of news is sold to an audience will be adjusted to the actual audience);

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b) setting, which is a feature associated with the immediate (physical) situation of the communication;

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c) props, which are usually part of institutional contexts and include features such as furniture, rooms, etc.;

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d) action, which is a collective term of non-verbal meaningful acts such as gestures, etc.;

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e) higher level action, which refers to the observation that “contexts also need a higher level definition of the whole situation or event” (van Dijk, 1997, p. 14) beyond the actual communicative context. The description of higher-level action is necessary as all contexts are usually part of a (previously planned) sequence or series of events;

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f) local and global contexts, which include the interactional, i.e. immediate context, and the societal, i.e. larger scale (historical) context. This aspect relates to immediate and longer term social, political effects of discourse. It should also be noted that contexts are not fixed or given: they are dynamic rather than static as they are part of both local and global contexts. It must be noted at this point that contexts cannot be fully objective as contexts: they are “socially-based mental construct[s]” (van Dijk, 1997, p. 16) in individuals’ minds, which includes space for subjective interpretations on the part of researcher as the researcher perceives contexts through his own mind.
 

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The third and fourth components of the Discourse–Society Interface, Power and Ideology will only be introduced shortly here and will be elaborated on in Sections 4.5.2.4.3 and 4.5.2.4.4 below due to their complexity. Power is a key notion in the study of social group relations (van Dijk 1997): such group relations also surface in discourse and thus the power enacted in discourse is analysable. A more detailed discussion of the component of power follows in Section 4.5.2.4.3 and it will be shown how power relates to translations and the work of translators.

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Ideology, on the other hand, is “the cognitive counterparts of power” (van Dijk, 1997, p. 5). In other words, ideology is the social realisation of power and dominance in the sense that ideology determines the ways language users engage in discourse as members of dominant, dominated or competing social groups with a view to trying to realise group interests (van Dijk 1997) through discourse. It follows from this that ideology has social functions as well: “[i]deologies are developed by dominant groups in order to reproduce and legitimate their domination” (van Dijk 1997, p. 25). Due to its complexity, the component of Ideology is further discussed in Section 4.5.2.4.4.
 
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