An Investigation of the Effect of Ideological, Economic, and Status Components on Political News Translation

Translation is a challenging task, especially when it deals with ideological turns. Translations may be manipulated and rewritten by rival parties to serve their own interests and convey their own ideologies and also translators play a significant role in negotiating meaning within social and political processes. In the field of ideological turns, different matters are being discussed from among which, discussion of patronage suggested by Lefevere is debatable; the latter consists of three components, i.e. ideological, economic, and status components that, according to Lefevere’s theory, affect literature products and especially translation. Taking this reality into account, the present descriptive-qualitative study was designed to investigate the effect of these three components on the English translation of Persian political news and on the selection of news by MEMRI (the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute) website; MEMRI translates the news of Middle East countries into European languages. The results revealed that these three components affected MEMRI’s translations and also the selections of Persian political news for translation.