Conveying Political Stance in Translation: A Contrastive Translation Study of Two Opposing Source Texts

This thesis is a translation and commentary that seeks to compare two texts of opposite stance on the UN’s Fact-Finding Mission’s Goldstone Report of 2009 to investigate war crimes committed during the Gaza conflict of 2008-09, and which was recanted by Goldstone in 2011. The First text is taken from Norman Finkelstein’s Method and Madness (2014), where the author criticizes Goldstone’s recantation and provides evidence, he believes Goldstone could have cited to support his argument. The other text is part of Alan Dershowitz’s article "The Case Against the Goldstone Report" (2010), where the argument is provided against the report’s findings and accuses it of being biased. Guided by Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Framework (AF), I aim to detect the significant evaluative and inter-subjective meanings at stake when translating polemical and argumentative text and conveying them properly into Arabic. The translation is preceded by a critical commentary that addresses the methods and strategies followed in capturing each author's political stance and contrasting their styles in expressing their attitude towards the report. The analysis section focused mainly on two areas of the Appraisal; (1) attitudinal assessment and (2) attribution, and draws on the patterns in each author’s style. It shows how does Finkelstein follow a different style than that of Dershowitz when it comes to attitudinal assessment, where the former uses tokens more than the latter who tend to express his stance in a more explicit style. The thesis presents some techniques that can be followed to capture each author’s style. It also studies the style each author uses when referring to outside voices; where Finkelstein opts to using insertion, while Dershowitz prefers assimilation more, in addition to the reporting verbs each author uses more.