Among factors that might manipulate translators’ mind while producing a text
is the notion of ideology transmission through text or talk. Adopting Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA) with particular emphasis on the framework of Van
Dijk (1999)، the present investigation is an attempt to shed light on the
relationship between language and ideology involved in translation in general،
and more specifically، to uncover the underlying ideological assumptions
invisible in the texts، both source text (ST) and target text (TT)، and
consequently ascertain whether or not translators’ ideologies are imposed in
their translations.
The corpus consists of the full text of two different Persian translations of
the book Media Control by Noam Chomsky، written in English. In a qualitative
phase، a detailed contrastive/comparative study at the micro-level in terms of
fore/back-grounding mechanisms including explanation of lexical items and
dominant grammatical metaphors (passive vs. active، nominalization vs. denominalization،
addition vs. omission، and modalization) was conducted to
examine، describe and subsequently interpret the patterns in the English source
text and its Persian translated versions. In order to make the research data
interpretations as objective as possible، having computed frequencies of
ideologically significant instances، and percentages، Chi-square formula was
applied to find out any difference between proportions of information
extracted from the target text concerning their fore/back-grounding and their
positions against the source text as well as to test the research null hypothesis،
which was consequently rejected.
The findings reveal that there are significant changes made by the two
translators، either intentionally or unintentionally، in their selection of lexical
items and syntactic structures in comparison to those in the source text. The
findings of the study also show that many distortions or transformations
between the original and the two translated versions were not only arbitrary،
but also ideologically encoded in the texts، with specific purposes and functions
