Reflection of Ideological Orientations in Translation of Feminist Discourse: A Case Study of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”

Recently the role of ideology and the impact of translator’s point of view on the process of translation have significantly been considered in translation studies. In this regard, this study applied Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and its three Persian translations, which were translated after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 in Iran. This research was conducted based on Farahzad’s three-dimensional CDA model (2009) in translation studies. According to Farahzad (2009), Comparative Translation Criticism was carried out at two levels: textual and paratextual. To do this, an English feminist book by Woolf (1995) entitled “A Room of One’s Own” along with its three Persian translated versions (Mehrshadi, 2016; Sajedi, 2005; and Noorbakhsh, 2004) were critically analyzed at textual and paratextual levels in a qualitative approach in order to reveal the effect of ideological orientations on the Persian translations of this feminist book. The results of the study indicated that although the translators tried to convey the author’s feminist ideology, there were some differences at textual and paratextual levels, since social and political background knowledge, religious beliefs, and cultural attitudes influenced the translations.