Ideology in Translating Political News: A Case Study of the Turkish Coup Attempt (July 2016)

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the ideological markers during the process of translating political online news after the Turkish coup July 2016. It attempts to answer the question with regard to the extent to which ideology may be utilized to manipulate the political news. It also sheds light on the strategies used to manipulate the translated political news. The study highlights the manipulation of the standards of textuality whilst re-textualizing the source text into a target text. The data of this study is based on news items regarding the Turkish coup attempt in July 2016 which were collected from various Arabic and English news websites concerned with political international issues. The researchers adopted an interdisciplinary approach including the analysis based on Newmark (1988) and De Beaugrand and Dressler (1992), and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) following Lefevere's (1992) framework as a backcloth for the discussion. The study concludes that ideology plays a significant role in translation, and the strategies of omission, addition, paraphrasing and lexicalization adopted by the translators highly involve ideological markers. The study reveals that translators manipulated four standards of textuality including intentionality, acceptability, situationally and intertextuality hence, translators might not bridge the gap in covering political news and transferring the truth as is.