Translating Ideological Stance: A Contrastive Translation Study of Ideologically Opposing Source Texts

This translation and commentary thesis explores how insights from the Appraisal Framework (AF) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) can be drawn on to identify the cross-linguistic challenges and issues arising from translating two texts with opposing stances. The thesis discusses two separate source texts written by two different authors that have contrasting evaluative positions vis-à-vis the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Both texts are imbued with the authors’ ideological stances. The thesis seeks to highlight relevant translation issues with the aid of the adopted theoretical model and how these identified elements are important to be captured or accounted for by virtue of their contribution to the overall stance of the authorial voice. It will be demonstrated that accounting for those discoursal elements in translation is crucial given the genre and functionality of the source texts. The target texts produced as part of this thesis presuppose a skopos, namely, to reproduce and capture the ideological locutions and inter-subjective positions, insofar as this is possible, thereby achieving what White (2012) refers to as ‘attitudinal commensurability’ in translation (p. 151). The analysis primarily revolves around three focus areas (1) textual elements (2) attitudinal assessment and (3) engagement.