Article published in:
Translation and the Genealogy of Conflict
Edited by Luis Pérez-González
[Journal of Language and Politics 11:2] 2012
► pp. 250–272

Uncovering ideology in translation

A case study of Arabic and Hebrew translations of the ‘Roadmap Plan’

| City University, London

This paper examines aspects of political ideology as realised through translation in the context of a case study, the translations of the Roadmap Plan. The Roadmap is one of several peace plans or initiatives that have been launched in the last decades to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Originally drafted in English in 2003 by the Quartet, the plan was subsequently translated into Arabic and Hebrew by different institutions and news media. This paper begins by examining the textual profiles of the different Arabic and Hebrew versions, focusing on their functions and principles of audience design. This study then moves on to establish how ideological factors inform translational choices as well as the interpretation of translated texts by readers. The main body of the analysis, informed by concepts and methods of descriptive translation studies and critical discourse analysis, focuses on the translator’s mediation of proper names (including protagonists of the conflict and toponyms); instances of deliberately ambiguous or vague drafting; and politically sensitive terms (e.g. ‘normalisation’ or ‘curfew’). The concluding section accounts for the findings of the analysis in terms of the social, political, and ideological constraints shaping the different language versions of the document under scrutiny.

Keywords: ideology, peace initiatives, translation, Palestinian-Israeli conflict, text production, Roadmap plan
Published online: 08 June 2012
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.11.2.05ayy
References
Baker, Mona
2006 Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London and New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Mona, and Saldanha, Gabriela
2008 Introduction to the second edition. In: Mona Baker, and Gabriela Saldanha (eds). The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, second edition. London and New York: Routledge, xx—xxii.Google Scholar
Bell, Alan
1984 Language style as audience design. Language in Society 131, 145—204. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Calzada-Pérez, María
2001 A three-level methodology for descriptive-explanatory translation studies. Target 13 (2), 203—239. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chesterman, Andrew
1997 Memes of Translation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chilton, Paul, and Schäffner, Christina
2003 Themes and principles in the analysis of political discourse. In Paul Chilton, and Christina Schäffner (eds). Politics as Text and Talk — Analytic Approaches to Political Discourse. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1—44.Google Scholar
Hermans, Theo
1995 Translation as institution. In: Mary Snell-Hornby, Zuzana Jettmarová and Klaus Kaindl (eds). Translation as Intercultural Communication: Selected Papers from the EST Congress-Prague 1995. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 3—20.Google Scholar
Greenbaum, Sidney
(1996) The Oxford English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Isaacson, Walter
1992 Kissinger: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Klein, Menachem
2007 A Possible Peace between Israel and Palestine: An Insider’s Account of the Geneva Initiative, translated by Haim Watzman. New York: Columbia University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klieman, Aharon
1999 Constructive Ambiguity in the Middle East Peace-Making, Research Report Series #10. Tel-Aviv: Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research.Google Scholar
Kornbluth, Danishai
2002 Jordan and the Anti-Normalization Campaign, 1994—2001. Terrorism and Political Violence 14 (3), 80—108. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levin, David
2003 Structure of news coverage of a peace process: A test of the indexing and zero-sum hypothesis. Journal of Politics 8 (4), 27—53.Google Scholar
Mason, Ian
1994 Discourse, ideology and translation. In: Robert De Beaugrande, Abdullah Shunnaq, and Mohammed Helmy Heliel (eds). Language, Discourse and Translation in the West and Middle East. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 23—34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Massoud, Tansa George
(2000) Fair division, adjusted winner procedure (AW), and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Journal of Conflict Resolution 44 (3), 333—358. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pehar, Drazen
2001 Language and negotiation: A Middle East lexicon. In: Jovan Kurbalija, and Hannah Slavik. (eds). Language and Diplomacy. Malta: DiploProjects, Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies, 163—199.Google Scholar
Pym, Anthony
2004 Introduction: On the social and the cultural in translation studies. In: Zuzana Jettmarová, Anthony Pym, and Miriam Shlesinger (eds). Sociocultural Aspects of Translation and Interpreting. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1—25.Google Scholar
Saldanha, Gabriela
2008 Critical linguistics. In: Mona Baker, and Gabriela Saldanha (eds). The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, second edition. London and New York: Routledge, 151—153.Google Scholar
Shamir, Jacob, and Shikaki, Khalil
2005 Public opinion in the Israeli-Palestinian two-level game. Journal of Peace Research 42 (3), 311—328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schäffner, Christina
1997 Strategies of translating political texts. In: Anna Trosborg (ed.). Text Typology and Translation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 119—143. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 Translation, politics, ideology. CTIS Occasional Papers 21, 97—111.Google Scholar
2008 Functionalist Approaches. In: Mona Baker, and Gabriela Saldanha (eds). The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, second edition. London and New York: Routledge, 115—121.Google Scholar
Wolf, Michaela
2002 Translation activity between culture, society and the individual: Towards a sociology of translation. CTIS Occasional Papers 21, 33—44.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Al-Hejin, Bandar
2012. Linking critical discourse analysis with translation studies. Journal of Language and Politics 11:3 ► pp. 311 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 january 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.