Ideologically Driven Strategies in the Translation of Comics before and after the Islamic Revolution

This paper was aimed at studying the translation of Tintin comics before and after the Islamic revolution to determine the marked strategies adopted for translating Tintin comics before and after the Islamic Revolution and finally to discuss if the marked strategies were ideologically motivated or not. With the emergence of new approaches in critical linguistics and their applications in translation studies, the role of ideology in the translation process and on the finished product has become considerably significant. The methods followed in this research are critical discourse analysis, (CDA) as developed by Fairclough (1989) and again benefited from the approach proposed by Farahzad(2012) to find the marked translation strategies and to show whether the differences between translations were motivated by ideology or not. The study takes advantage of bilingual parallel corpus. Two translations of each book into Persian were analyzed in the corpus. Each of the Persian translations rendered during two completely distinct political eras of Iran; one before and the other after the Islamic Revolution. The major items which were analyzed and focused on were the comparison of the translation done by Rayehe-Andishe Publications of Tintin comics after the Islamic Revolution with the ones done by Universal Publications before the Islamic Revolution. The study revealed that there have been some changes in text of the comics’ translations after Revolution to accord them to children’s age and the ideology of that era. In all examples, the translator of the earlier translated text seems to have tried to correspond to the original version. In contrast, the translator of the TT2 seems to have deliberately added/mistranslated/omitted/euphemised the words or phrases or sentences relating to the translated text. It was also revealed that most of the marked strategies were ideologically driven as suggested by CDA proponents.