When Ideology and Identity Compete in Translation Policies: A Case Study

Falling under sociolinguistics, translation policy has been recently under extensive scrutiny, especially in European contexts. Investigating this area of Translation Studies at a broader scope and in less explored contexts, however, is deemed pressing due to the growing trend in immigration and mobility and more attention paid to the linguistic rights of the minorities. This study, therefore, attempts to find out how translation policies on TV in Iran determine the extent to which linguistic minorities are given sociolinguistic parity as to accessibility to the media. Making use of the findings from a case study, it intends to explore the rivalry between the hegemonic ideology and ethnolinguistic identity in translation policy in order to deepen our insight into the significance of translation policies and unveil their implications for the linguistic minorities as regards their linguistic rights, social identity and their inclusion in or exclusion from the larger community. The investigation of translation policies has mostly been based on a modified version of a model proposed by Spolsky (2004) to explore the language policy. This modified model breaks translation policy into translation management, translation practices, and translation beliefs in order for the researcher to be better able to study and analyze each individual component. Although the ideology of the authorities who make the policies have been taken into account in this model and investigated in some studies, the expectations and opinions of the consumers of such policies have been overlooked in most studies. This study, therefore, tries to fill this gap by incorporating the concepts from the communications studies, specifically from the Audience Reception Theory by Stuart Hall (1993) in order to shed light on the significance and role of the reception dimension in appraising translation policies.status: accepte