Translation as Invasion: Rereading the Controversy between Translation and Culture

Document Type : research article

Authors

1 Department Translation Studies, Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University, Tabriz, Iran

2 Department Translation Studies Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University, Tabriz, Iran

Abstract

One of the areas of dominance of the colonial powers over other countries is the linguistic dominance. In the field of postcolonial studies, translation is sometimes interpreted as an act of invasion in addition to its traditional definition. Conceived as an attack tool against the colonized, translation attacks the language, culture and identity of the colony in order to maintain the colonizers interests in those countries, and uses direct propaganda, news and media to inject the colonizer’s culture and language into these nations. The way this discourse is formed is reflected in Sussan Bassnett’s (2014) theory of cultural translation. In this regard, the current research, with a descriptive-analytical method and a cultural approach, has investigated the examples of aggressive translation in the news texts of the last few years on pages, virtual channels and domestic news agencies. The selection of the statistical population of this research was in line with the objectives and research problem and in a purposeful manner. The results of the research showed that the important cultural, intellectual and discursive areas of the target text have been attacked in terms of lexical translation due to the performance of the media. In fact, the evaluation of the data, in addition to understanding how the discursive space of the media affects translation, has explained some parts of this post-colonial discourse in terms of translation.

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