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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4.5.2.4.3 Discourse–Society Interface: Power
4.5.2.4.3 Discourse–Society Interface: Power

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In van Dijk’s CDA, power represents the social power of groups or institutions, which “is based on privileged access to socially valued resources, such as wealth, income, position, status, force, group membership, education or knowledge” (van Dijk 1993, p. 254). Social power, at the same time, means control: those groups that have more power are capable of controlling the acts and minds of (the members of) other groups (van Dijk 2001). This, at the same time, means that those social groups that are able to bring other social groups under control are considered more powerful. Social power can be effected in two ways: (1) through coercive power such as military power, which is based on force; and through (2) persuasive power, which is based on knowledge, information and authority and is realised in discourse. Consequently, powerful groups may limit the freedom of action of other groups but may also influence their minds through persuasion, manipulation and ideology (van Dijk 1993).

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Obviously, besides physical power, there is cognitive power exercised over groups, which surface as discoursal persuasion and other strategies to bring about a change in others’ minds for the promotion of one’s interests (van Dijk 1993). And naturally, “instead of physical power, linguistic power is used in democracies to persuade others” (Jones and Wareing, 1999, p. 38), which can be enacted for instance through media discourse including newspaper articles and their translations. As power is enacted in discourse, the Discourse–Society Interface must account for power relations by describing and explaining the ways social power and dominance operate in discourse (van Dijk 2001). More precisely, the Interface should attempt to unfold the ways such dominance is realised in and through discourse.

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Connecting the media and power, van Dijk (1993, p. 255) claims that in today’s mediatised world, “[p]ower and dominance are usually organized and institutionalized” (emphasis in the original). In this respect, social dominance, i.e. power, may also be ideologically sustained and reproduced by the media. Those groups that sustain and reproduce power or arrange for the sustenance or reproduction thereof are termed power elites by van Dijk (1993). Elites have more or less exclusive access to public discourse. In a similar fashion and situation, journalists control media discourse, and, in turn, translators control translated discourse. According to van Dijk (2001), such elites control the context (properties of the social situation in question), the structure (e.g. genre) and the topics (macrostructure) of discourse. Translators, thus, can become members of the power elite by controlling such aspects of their translations.

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Power, as argued above, extends to the production of discourse and to the access to discourse. This in practice means that power elites will determine whose power will be underscored through discourse and who is allowed to have their voice heard through discourse. Discourse in this respect can easily “help produce and reproduce unequal power relations” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997, p. 258) and thus sustain and reproduce existing possibly unequal power relations. If access to discourse, power enactment in discourse and purposeful reproduction of power in discourse are realised in an institutionalised and socially structured, credible (seeming) and domineering way to promote the interest of certain social groups and to legitimate their power, we talk about ideologies.
 
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