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Article published In:
FORUM
Vol. 15:1 (2017) ► pp.1–27

Identifying political and ideological bias in translated newspaper articles

The Political Bias Screener

| Budapest Business School University of Applied Sciences

Translation can serve the purposes of gaining, maintaining and even abusing political power in the interests of certain political groups. In order to identify political manipulation in translated texts, a text linguistics based tool called Political Bias Screener has been developed, which includes superstructure and macrostructure analysis, critical discourse analysis and political mass communication related theories. This article describes the most relevant theoretical foundations and the component models of the Screener, investigates its validity and reliability and introduces the most important research findings obtained with its help. The findings show possible tendencies of translator behaviour and are transferable to other research fields in Translation Studies.

Keywords: argumentative political texts, bias, critical discourse analysis, ideology, mass communication
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical foundations of the Political Bias Screener
  • 3.Testing the Political Bias Screener
    • 3.1The validity of the constituent models of the Political Bias Screener
    • 3.2The reliability of the constituent models of the Political Bias Screener
      • 3.2.1Reliability of the superstructure analysis
      • 3.2.2Reliability of the macrostructure analysis
      • 3.2.3Reliability of the CDA analysis
      • 3.2.4Reliability of the political mass communication analysis
  • 4.Results generated by the Political Bias Screener
    • 4.1Superstructure analysis
    • 4.2Macrostructure analysis
    • 4.3CDA analysis
    • 4.4Political mass communication analysis
  • 5.Summary and conclusions
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 4 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/forum.15.1.01ban
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