Mátyás Bánhegyi: The Effects of Politics and Ideology on the Translation of Argumentative Political Newspaper Articles
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Chapter 7: Research design
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7.2 Criteria for selecting source texts

7.2 Criteria for selecting source texts

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According to Tymoczko’s (2002) views on descriptive ideology-related Translation Studies Research and Bhatia’s (1993) suggestions on the identification of the contextual properties of texts, in choosing the source language articles to be included in the research the following selection criteria were applied.

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1. The source texts must be authentic, unabridged articles so that any purposeful or unintentional textual manipulation on the part of the researcher can be excluded. The impartiality of the researcher is a crucial factor in terms of the reliability of the current research.

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2. The source texts must target political persuasion and thus be argumentative. Political bias and possible manipulation are likely to surface in argumentative articles, which makes such texts especially suitable for analysis. Furthermore, argumentative articles have been used in Translation Studies concerning the analysis of the reproduction of argumentation in target texts, cf. Tirkkonen-Condit (1985).

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3. The source texts must be about a widely debated political issue. As these issues generate a lot of political tension and interest, it is likely that both journalists and translators will politically position themselves with reference to the issues in question. Such positioning may surface in the target texts, potentially giving fruitful research results.

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4. The source texts were used at a time which was, in a political sense, a heated period in the life of Hungary. These periods typically prompt politically active persons and the media (including translators dealing with mediatised texts) to take sides. Textually such side-taking may potentially surface in the form of bias and the reproduction of ideology. At the same time, such events may be seen from several different angles and argued very differently, which potentially creates ample research space for the analysis of political bias and the reproduction of ideology in translations.

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5. The source texts should be a minimum of 350 words since it has been shown that logically appropriate argumentation cannot be developed in texts shorter than 350 words (Kinneavy et al. [1985]; Lincoln [1986]). For the feasibility of the analysis, texts longer than 500 words have been excluded as the analysis of longer texts would have caused difficulty and could have yielded a quite extensive amount of research data in the analysis and could thus have undermined the testing of the Screener.

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Another factor in the selection of texts for translation is that source texts have to be short enough to be translated within a relatively short time. As translators were not paid for their job (cf. Section 7.4), giving longer texts for translation might have resulted in their refusal to participate in the survey, thus risking the success of the current research.

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6. The next criterion is that the articles should come from newspapers that politically oppose each other. This ensures that the articles will reflect political bias towards the left and the right political wing, respectively.

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7. In terms of the phrasing of the source texts to be selected, articles that contain phrases and expressions (such as political nicknames, etc.) deeply rooted in Hungarian culture and contemporary Hungarian political climate have been anticipated to create political bias, as such expressions can only be rendered meaningfully in an explanatory way, possibly through explicitation. Therefore, target texts are likely to contain contemporary Hungarian politics related expressions and phrases that do not yet have commonly accepted English translations, which may possibly signal bias and the reproduction of ideology on the part of translators.
 
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