Ideological manipulation in the translation of political discourse : a study of presidential speeches after the Arab Spring based on corpora and critical discourse analysis.

Abstract The present study explains that ideology can affect translators’ linguistic selections which can consequently shape the receivers’ worldviews. Owing to the fact that after the Arab Spring, new leaders with different ideologies and belonging to different political movements sprung forth, their political discourse has become a subject of increasing interest. The language these leaders use to promote their own political and ideological visions and the way to interpret them requires analysis to detect the possibility of translators’ intervention in the translation of these speeches. Adopting a mixed approach of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, the present study focuses on investigating the manipulation of the source text ideology in the translation of presidential speeches after the Arab Spring. The source texts analysed in this study are 20 speeches by the former Egyptian president Morsi translated into English by five translators of various ideological backgrounds. The analysis of these source texts is based on the extraction of keywords and a selection of keywords with ideological content. The analysis of the target texts, on the other hand, focuses on the use of ideological keywords in lexical patterns and grammatical structures to detect ideological manipulation in translation. The thesis aims to describe systematically the means through which translations transfer, strengthen, or mitigate the ideology underlying the source texts. Using five parallel corpora of the source texts and their translations, the thesis also aims to ascertain whether the lexical choices and the syntactic structures employed in the target texts engender changes in the ideological content of the source texts and their underlying ideology. The results reveal that two out of the five translations project a manipulated ideology that is at variance with the ideology underlining the original texts. One translation strengthens the ideology of the source texts, whereas the other two translations aim to maintain the original ideology unchanged. This indicates that instances of ideological manipulation are probable even in the translation of presidential speeches due to the nature of the source texts, the ideology underlying them as well as the possibility of an ideological clash