Ideological Aspects of Drama Translation: A Case Study of Persian Translation of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People”

Abstract

Translation of drama has received little academic attention in Iran, especially from the ideological point of view. Based on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework and with a particular emphasis on van Dijk's social-cognitive model (van Dijk 1988, 1998b, 1995, 1998a), this study attempted to investigate the effect of ideological tendencies of translators in two English translations of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People along with its Persian translation by Amir Hossein Aryanpour. The analysis of selected sentences showed there have been significant changes made by the Persian translator, intentionally or unintentionally, leading to the polarization of us versus them by his (dis)approval of the ideological content of the original drama. This polarization has mostly been realized through omitting or manipulating of particular source sentences in the target text, or adding new elements (at lexical and/or syntactic levels).