Investigating the Influence of Ideology on Translation: A Critical Discourse Analysis of “A Tale of Two Cities” and its Persian Translations

Translation has a crucial role in human life. Despite the importance of the influence of ideology in translation, there is lack of research in this area. This study tries to investigate the influence of ideology on translations from English into Persian. The corpus consists of “A Tale of Two Cities” written by Charles Dickens (1859) along with its two Persian translations"داستان دو شهر" written by Ebrahimi (1980) and Younesi (1999). The researchers applied Fairclough’s (1989) approach to investigate ideological differences between the original text and the translated versions. They focused on the importance of experiential values which depict the text producer’s experience of the natural and social world. The results showed a significant difference between classification schemes, ideological contested words, overwordings and meaning relations of the source book and its two Persian translations. We also found Younesi’s translation ideologically closer to the source book. The findings of this study may help instructors to make the debate of translation studies far away from substituting lexical and grammatical equivalences. It is effective for researchers and practitioners in translation to pay more attention to the ideology as a major aspect of language and culture. It can also be useful for translators in criticizing and evaluating translation, and improving their works to translate books, news, or articles particularly from English to Persian.