International Journal of English Language and Translation Studies (Aug 2018)

Positive Self-Presentation and Negative Other-Presentation in Farsi Translation of Hard Choices

  • Roghayeh Adlpour,
  • Razieh Eslamieh

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 06, no. 03
pp. 32 – 40

Abstract

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Political text writers are often tended to implement rhetorical strategies, including the discursive ideological strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, to imply and impose their ideological intentions on the audience. The utilization of such strategies may cause translation problems for translators of political texts. Political texts in particular usually act as a source of problem for novice translators who read texts in a traditional way and understand the texts in an uncritical manner. The present paper, attempting to introduce such political rhetorical strategies in English as the source language and their proper rendition in Farsi as the target language, offers a critical discourse analysis of Amir Ghaderi’s Farsi translation of Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices (2014). To this end, Van Dijk’s CDA approach (2004) was used. However, the study has explored only four strategies out of 27 including -hyperbole, euphemism, polarization and vagueness. The results showed that euphemism, with 41 instances out of total 60 instances, was the most frequently observed discursive strategy, as the source text had the political end of highlighting the power and dominance of the source text state to the reader. The other three discursive strategies were observed with relatively close rate: hyperbole =8, polarization =8, and vagueness=3. The findings of this study have the potentialities to make generalization about the meaningful high frequency of euphemism and the use of other discursive strategies in political texts.

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