Applying Critical Discourse Analysis in Translation of Political Speeches: A Focus on Non-defining Modifiers

Abstract

As the quintessence of persuasive speech, political speeches can pose serious difficulties in translating due to their unique features. Prior to translating, appropriate discourse understanding is needed to ensure a higher quality political speech translation and its adequacy. From ancient times, language has been used as an ingenious device for the transmission of ideology and for the manipulation of audience minds by those in power. As Kress in Van Dijk (1985) states, "Ideologies find their clearest articulation in language. Hence, a powerful way of examining ideological structure is through the examination of language." Adopting Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), with particular emphasis on the framework of Fairclough (1989) and utilizing the notions of systemic functional linguistics by Halliday (1985), the present study attempts to shed light on the relationship between language and ideology involved in translation in general, and specifically to uncover the underlying ideological assumptions hidden in the texts through the use of non-defining modifiers, and ascertain whether translators' ideologies are imposed in their translations. The study corpus consists of 15 transcripts of three US presidential speeches delivered at national and international events from 2020 backwards. The obtained results prove that the application of CDA for the analysis of political speeches in English helps the translator to become aware of the genre conventions, social and situational context of the source text, and outlines the formation of ideological expression by using non-defining modifiers on the discourse level.