Mátyás Bánhegyi: The Effects of Politics and Ideology on the Translation of Argumentative Political Newspaper Articles
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Chapter 1: Introduction
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1.3 Starting points of the research

1.3 Starting points of the research

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The present book seeks to explore and compare ideology and political bias in newspaper articles and in their translations: two argumentative news articles published in two Hungarian quality newspapers and their English translations will be analysed. In the current undertaking, three starting premises are assumed: Fairclough’s (1992) three-dimensional view of discourse analysis, which – in our understanding – can also be extended to translation; Munday’s (2007) observation that professional translators consciously use translation strategies when working with political texts; and Vermeer’s (1996) translation-related skopos theory.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Fairclough’s (1992) three-dimensional view of discourse analysis claims that discourses, also including – in our understanding and case – translation, basically have three dimensions: the actual spoken or, in our case, written text describing something, the interaction between people as part of producing and interpreting the text, and the social action any text is necessarily part of. This last factor can only be understood through the explanation of the relations between the text and its social environment, and the characteristics of these relations. Fairclough (1992, pp. 10–11) also notes that “[t]he relationship between social action and text is mediated by interaction: that is, the nature of the interaction, how texts are produced and interpreted, depends upon the social action in which they are embedded”. In other words, texts can meaningfully be understood and interpreted only in their larger social context. As shown in Figure 1.1, Fairclough (1992) visually represents this orientation to discourse analysis as follows.
 
Figure 1.1: Fairclough’s (1992) three-dimensional view of discourse analysis
Note: Taken from Fairclough, 1992, p. 10
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

With relation to the present research, this bears the following relevance: the features of texts (both source and target texts), the interaction (i.e., the production of the texts under scrutiny both by the journalists and the translators), as well as the interpretation of the texts under scrutiny (i.e., the interpretation of source texts by translators and the interpretation of target texts by the addresses) must be studied in the light of the characteristics of source and target texts, respectively. Furthermore, the social, or in our case and to be more precise, the political action the analysed texts are part of need to be described and explained. All this reflects the need to apply a many-sided, multidisciplinary approach comprising all details of the above textual features when an analytical tool is to be created for the purposes of the present undertaking.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The next starting point is Munday’s (2007) observation, who concludes that professional translators’ textual choices reflect the “conscious strategy of the translator” (Munday 2007, p. 213). This suggests that translators construct their texts only and exclusively through conscious textual choices. It will be assumed that translators, when translating political texts, perform their assignments with this in mind, and it will be presupposed that whatever textually surfaces in translations is the result of conscious professional choices.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The last starting point is Vermeer’s (1996) skopos theory, which states that translation is a kind of human interaction defined by its purpose (or ‘skopos’ in Greek). This, with reference to the current research, implies that from a functional aspect all translators try to perform their assignments with a view to the (perceived) purpose of communication associated with the text, and, at the same time, try to adhere to their clients’ communicative purpose. Theoretically, this in practice is supposed to mean the following: translators are likely to translate texts in a way that the resulting target texts are the closest to the political taste of their clients and that translators try to predict what target texts would satisfy their clients.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

In addition to the above, besides striving to come up to clients’ expectations, translators’ own political views and commitments should also be focused on, which may well intervene with the resulting textual end products. Consequently, it will be explored if, and to what extent, the political expectations of the clients in the translation assignment influence translators’ work with reference to the resulting target texts. Besides this, translators’ own political views that may interfere with the translation process and may surface in the created texts will be examined. With a view to this, the current research has been designed with these considerations in mind, and a novel tool, the Political Bias Screener has been created to explore the effects these factors exert on the resulting target texts.
 
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