Ideology

Focusing on the intersection of translation and activism, the current study aimed to address the issue of publishers’ activist agency in the socio-political context of post-revolutionary Iran. In so doing, it mainly drew on Tymoczko’s (2010a) conceptualization of political and ideological agency and activism as engagement and her classification of its different forms. The data came from a body of publishers’ notes, written on Persian translations of six English books selected through criterion sampling from the works that apparently enjoyed a level of prestige among the international readers , and reflected the Other’s views on religious, philosophical, political, and socio-cultural issues, which considering the fundamental values of the Islamic Republic of Iran that the post-revolutionary State tries to keep, could make them a possible site of translational activism. The results showed that in their notes the publishers had encoded their engagement by using a combination of different forms of engagement, i.e., publicizing, witnessing, rousing, inspiring, and mobilizing; they also revealed their interest in introducing the unfamiliar territory of the foreign to the Persian-speaking readers, and in increasing their understanding of the Other’s culture. They emphasized the importance of tolerance, pluralism, openness, and mutual respect in cultural exchanges but introduced the source Islamic culture and its set of moral values as criteria for determining the validity of the Other’s presented ideas and beliefs and rejecting what did not meet such criteria.

Starting from the basic Faircloughian and Van Dijkian principle of the Critical Discourse Analysis admitting that it is not only the explicit content of the text that conveys meaning, but it is the underlying and therefore implicit meanings that guide reading, this paper aims to analyze the manipulations of the translator in the philosophical-ideological text of The Temptation of Materialism. This article therefore aims to identify the direct and diagonal factors that fall within the ideological orientations of the translator and environmental constraints. This ensues that the projection of the translatum in the target language & culture is considerably modified. To start the analysis, two questions would be addressed immediately: 1- What are internal and then external forces that help to divert the French text from its original meaning; 2- What are the translational stratagems that the translator uses to convey the author's ideas through his individual, even subjective perspective?