The Translatorʹʹs Agency and the Ideological Manipulation in Translation: the Case of Political Texts in Translation Classrooms in Iran

This study aimed to investigate how and to what extent Iranian translation students are familiar with the changes that the meanings of ethics and manipulation have undergone in translation studies. To this end, the researcher selected an editorial from the SpaceWar website regarding United States’ claims about Iran’s nuclear program and gave it as a translation assignment to thirty postgraduate Iranian students majoring in Translation studies at Sheikhbahaee University, Iran. Firstly, the students were asked to merely translate the text. In the second phase, the students were asked to translate the given text in order to be published in Keyhan newspaper. Two sets of translations were analyzed Using Van Dijk’s (2004) CDA Framework. Finally, frequencies and percentages of the discursive structures were computed across two sets of translations and used to systematically find out what proportions of the information extracted from translated texts were noticeably manipulated compared to the source text. The findings of the study showed that there is no any significant difference across two types of translations. Furthermore, it was revealed that lexicality is the most frequent discursive structure used by the students to show their ideology in translation.