Verb Tenses and Their Ideological Implications on Translated Texts Based on CDA

Today, translation has become a major means of communication. It plays an important role in the transfer of information and establishing relationships among individuals and nations. Translation is "a conscious, planned activity, performed in a controlled manner and aims at establishing communication between different cultural environments"(as cited in Sidiropoulou 2004, p.1). Ideology is considered highly important in a wide range of academic disciplines including cultural studies, communications, linguistics, and translation studies. Ideology and its effect on translation have long become a research focus in the field of translation studies. If we advocate the theories on the relationship between translation and ideology, then we would witness many cultural clashes revealing the distance between the source text and the ideological encounters it creates in the translated text.
Therefore, surveying different translations of the same source text from an ideological point of view can yield insightful clues as to where the differences of these translations come from. The present paper reports the results of a study conducted aiming to explore the relationship between ideology and translation as well as the impact of the translator’s ideology and the dominant ideology on the target text. The process of translation is manipulated by ideology, which involves both the translator’s ideology and the dominant ideology of the society. It is the complex interaction of the two ideologies that results in the difference in the translation product as well as the necessary changes made in the process of translation through the translator’s subjectivity. Many scholars have emphasized that the exercise of ideology is as old as the history of translation itself. According to Fawcett (1998), “throughout the centuries, individuals and institutions applied their particular beliefs to the production of a certain effect in translation” (p. 107). He further claims that an ideological approach to translation can be found in some of the earliest examples of translation known to us.
Nevertheless, the linguistic-oriented approach to translation studies has failed to address the concept of ideology through years of prevalence, because such approaches are limited to their scientific models for research and the empirical data they collect, so that according to Venuti (1998a), “they remain reluctant to take into account the social values and ideologies that enter into translating as well as the study of it”. Perez (2003) reflects the ideas of CDA scholars, where she states that all language use is ideological and as translation is carried out on language use, translation itself is a site of ideological encounters. As Fawcett (1998, p.107) demonstrates, “translation, simply because of its existence, have always been ideological”. Schaffner (2003) mentions that ideological aspects within the text are determined at the lexical level and grammatical level. She explains: Ideological aspect can [...] be determined within a text itself, both at the lexical level (reflected, for example, in the deliberate choice or avoidance of a particular word [...]) and the grammatical level (for example, use of passive structures to avoid an expression of agency). Ideological aspects can be more or less obvious in texts, depending on the topic of a text, its genre, and communicative purposes.
This paper studies "verb tenses and their probable ideological implications in translation" based on Farhzad's Critical Model of Translation (2012), which uses a combination of Contrastive Discourse Analysis (CDA), Translation Strategies, and Intertextuality. The corpus of study has been taken out of the memories of two non-Iranian politicians (Nelson Mandela and Margaret Thatcher) and their translated books. The results showed several tense shifts in translation and their ideological implications, however not significant. Ideological implications in studying these books were not the same in the two books. The political background in Iran shows that these politicians enjoy different political and social perspectives from the points of view of dominant political power in Iran.
The study showed that applying tense shifts explores some ideological implications, consciously or unconsciously, to present Mandela as a popular, moral, and political character and person; but on the other hand, in a translation of Thatcher’s, the translator faces with a new status in the representation of happenings and events during the story. The political background of Thatcher shows her unfair positioning against Iran and its authority power and consequently its unpleasant and effects in representing events and ideology in translation which is undeniable. Although the statistical outputs of the ideological implications are not significant through the study, we cannot ignore the translator’s different strategies such as deleting a series of social and political issues through translation by removing traditional and religious customs and traditions for example in Mandela’s translation and/or deleting some ideological sentences in Thatcher’s. Ideological implications resulting from the tense shifts in both translations attempt to represent a significant and special characteristic of these persons in the society of Iran. The author believes that tense shifts, almost insignificantly, represent different outlooks from some angles of political, personality, and behavior of these two political faces.