Translation and Ideology

Encounters and Clashes

Sonia Cunico, Jeremy Munday

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138473782
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134967353
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Ideology has become increasingly central to work in translation studies. To date, however, most studies have focused on literary and religious texts, thus limiting wider understanding of how ideological clashes and encounters pervade any context where power inequalities are present. This special edition of The Translator deliberately focuses on ideology in the translation of a rich variety of lesser-studied genres, namely academic writing, cultural journals, legal and scientific texts, political interviews, advertisements, language policy and European Parliament discourse, in all of which translation as a social practice can be seen to shape, maintain and at times also resist and challenge the asymmetrical nature of exchanges between parties engaged in or subjected to hegemonic practices.

The volume opens with two ground-breaking papers that investigate the nature and representation of truth and knowledge in the translation of the sciences, followed by two contributions which approach the issue of shifts in the translation of ideology from the standpoint of critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis, using data from political speeches and interviews and from English and Korean versions of Newsweek. Other contributions discuss the role that translation scholars can play in raising public awareness of the manipulative devices used in advertising; the way in which potentially competing institutional and individual ideologies are negotiated in the context of interpreting in the European Union; the role translation plays in shaping the politics of a multilingual nation state, with reference to Belgium; and the extent to which the concepts of norms and polysystems may be productive in investigating the link between translation and ideology, with reference to Chinese data.

Interpreted Ideologies in Institutional Discourse

The Case of the European Parliament

MORVEN BEATON
University of Manchester, UK

Abstract. This article investigates the impact of simultaneous interpretation on ideology in the European Parliament, drawing on a larger empirical study (Beaton, in progress). The traditional Marxist definition of ideology is first rejected before a broader definition of ideology as ‘common sense’ is employed. The concepts of hegemony and axiology are then introduced to account for the struggle between the dominant institutional ideology and subjective interpreter beliefs and ethics. Comparative data analysis of German source texts and English target texts from European Parliament plenary sessions focuses on lexical repetition of key terms and hegemonic conceptual metaphor strings. The findings suggest that EU institutional hegemony is strengthened by simultaneous interpreters, primarily through extensive use of conceptual metaphor strings in the interpretation. In addition, contrary to conduit views of communication, this study provides evidence of interpreter mediation and agency and demonstrates that the simultaneous interpreter is an additional subjective actor in heteroglot communication.

Keywords.

Ideology,

hegemony,

axiology,

simultaneous interpreting,

European Union,

institutional communication

The interplay between ideology and language use has long been the focus of, and point of contention between, numerous disciplines. Not only does the definition of the term ideology itself result in (ideological) conflict between disciplines, but the traditional gap between text-heavy ‘linguistic’ approaches, where ideology is seen as something reified and dogmatic and is simply ‘read off’ the text on the one hand, and highly theoretical, non data-driven ‘social’ approaches to ideology on the other, arguably persists to this day. Some attempts have been made to bridge this gap, however. In their second edition of Language as Ideology, for example, Kress and Hodge (1993) explicitly recognize the influence that ‘social’ researchers have had on their work. Within translation studies, Harvey’s (2003:43-69) article on ideology in the bindings of French translations of American gay literature appeals convincingly for a view of translations not merely as causal products but also as events which “open up the possibility (however minor) of ideological innovation” (ibid.:46).

However, the focus on institutional ideology in the context of simultaneous interpreting is relatively new. To the best of my knowledge, Vuorikoski’s (2004) study of norms and quality assessment, based on a large multilingual corpus of EP speeches and their interpretations, is the only research project to have specifically examined SI in the European Parliament thus far. There have, however, been studies of mediated communication within the EP and the European institutions, including Calzada Pérez (1997) on transitivity as a textual manifestation of ideology in verbatim transcripts of EP plenary sessions and their translations. Koskinen’s (2000) work on the role of, and constraints on, translation at the European Commission, and particularly her current ethnographically-based research on the notion of culture in the translators’ workplace (Koskinen forthcoming), is of relevance to my conceptualization of ideologies in the EU. The research undertaken by Schäffner (2003, 2004) on metaphor in translation and by Musolff (2000a, 2000b) on comparative metaphor analysis, both specifically focusing on German and English, has also informed my approach to data analysis. Interpreting research focusing on other institutional settings such as the asylum process in Britain (Inghilleri 2003, 2005, 2007), the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (Wallmach 2002) and Italian television (Katan and Straniero-Sergio 2003) has similarly leant impetus to the current study, which is based on a close analysis of authentic material and in which translational activity is itself viewed as ideological.

1. Ideology

Although considered largely obsolete, the traditional Marxist definition of the concept has contributed much to the negative understanding of ideology as “a form of cognitive distortion, a false or illusory representation of the real” (Gardiner 1992:60). The value-laden condemnation implied in the use of the term ‘ideology’ to refer to the other, as opposed to oneself, explicitly excludes the speaker/writer from holding an ideology of his or her own. In other words, “Ours is the Truth, Theirs is the Ideology” (van Dijk 1998:2). This common view of ideology categorizes fascism and anarchism, but not liberal democracy for instance, as ideologies and declares certain political moves or measures to be “‘ideologically motivated’, as if others were not” (Hatim and Mason 1997:144).

An alternative view of ideology and the ideological treats ideology as something which is manifest in all discourse, and hence text, concluding that all thought is ideological. Thus, critical discourse analysts, for instance, use the concept of ideology “in the neutral sense of a world view, a largely unconscious theory of the way the world works accepted as common-sense” (Fowler 1985:65). If, in turn, the term ‘common sense’ is taken to mean “the implicit social knowledge that group members take for granted in their everyday social practices” (van Dijk 1998:102), then the same definition may be extended to the notion of ideology (ibid.). This implicit social knowledge differs from group to group, and thus results in a complex web of multiple ideologies, such that it makes sense to refer throughout to ideologies in the plural, rather than ideology in the singular.

1.1 Dominant and competing ideologies

The question of dominance, and the notion of a dominant ideology, are of particular interest in institutional settings. Eagleton defines ideology as a “set of discursive strategies for legitimizing a dominant power” (1994:8). In doing so, he clearly rejects the concept that all thought is ideological, leading to the view that “to study ideology is to study the ways in which meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of domination” (Thompson 1984:4).

One shortcoming of Eagleton’s approach, which equates ideology with dominance, is that ideologies of dissent are largely ignored. It is certainly the case that the dominant power seeks to establish legitimation through language by attempting to “fix meaning and univocalize the sign, and hereby to effect a form of ideological closure or homophony” (Gardiner 1992:90). Indeed, in the case of the current study, EU institutional ideology in European Parliament discourse serves to sustain the institution and thus effectively the relations of domination that characterize it, and can therefore be classified as a dominant ideology. However, one issue that has to be raised in this context is exactly who the actors involved in sustaining this ‘dominant ideology’ are. These subgroups surely also develop their own, more specific ideologies, tailored to their own interests, position, goals and power (van Dijk 1998:179), rendering the alliance a constantly shifting one. Therefore, at best the case can be made for certain ideology ‘fragments’ being shared in a common, overarching dominant ideology (ibid.:180).

At the same time, this ‘sharing’ of ideology fragments itself is not a stable process. A reified view of ideology assumes that it is manifest in language in the form of fixed signs rather than heteroglot semiotics (Grant 2004:12, drawing on Bakhtin), thus denying the concept fluidity and closing ideologies to hybrid influence. By contrast, treating ideologies as only temporarily stable recognizes their porosity. According to Bakhtin in his seminal work Discourse in the Novel, communication is characterized by a constant interplay and interaction between unifying centripetal forces and the dissenting centrifugal forces of dialogized heteroglossia (1981:273). This liberating approach to ideology directs our attention to the appropriation of power by individuals and groups, particularly in institutional settings.

In order to understand human behaviour, especially in institutional settings, the idea of a temporarily stable, dominant ideology of shifting alliances must be supplemented by the notion of ‘hegemony’, first introduced by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in The Prison Notebooks (Gramsci 1971). Drawing on Gramsci, Brookfield (1995:15) defines hegemony as

the process whereby ideas, structures and actions come to be seen by the majority of the people as wholly natural, preordained and working for their own good when in fact they are constructed and transmitted by powerful minority interests to protect the status quo that serves those interests.

Hegemony thus means that a dominant group does not necessarily rule by force, but that other groups internalize the ideology of the dominant group and hence sustain it, wittingly or unwittingly.

In the rest of this study I will use the term EU institutional hegemony to refer to the temporarily stable, dominant ideology of shifting alliances within the European Parliament.

1.2 Axiology

In response to van Dijk’s statement that “there are no personal ideologies” (1998:91), the question also has to be raised as to what role the subjective plays in constituting the hybrid mix of ideologies that can be isolated in author-specific and hence speaker-specific and interpreter-specific discourse and text. If the unique blend of ideologies that are manifest in the discourse and hence text of one individual in the communication situation is to be investigated, a concept must be found for subjective aspects of beliefs and values.

I would argue, following Grant (2004:21), that such a subjective system (again no more stable than the concept of ideology discussed above) does exist. Grant uses the term axiology to describe this system. Originally rooted in ethics as the study of goodness or worthwhileness¹ (ibid.:24), the concept is modified by Grant to refer to a system of subjective ethics in the sense of values and beliefs and to describe the “autonomous evaluativeness of communicator actions (and hence discourse and textual practices)” (ibid.:23). However, axiology (and, analogous to the term ideology above, axiologies) cannot be reduced to pure subjectivism. Rather, axiology is “socially constituted evaluation” (ibid.:27). Similar to ideology, axiology is not conceptualized as a “transcendent horizon against which newly constituted values are objectively judged”, but rather as an “autonomously dynamic and thus communicatively contingent relation in which values are constituted” (ibid.:28). Thus, like ideologies, axiologies are contingent and consistently renegotiated. Grant’s distinction between axiology as “mediation at the subjective level or subjective valuation” and ideology as “mediation at the social level, or the discursive valuation of a social system” (ibid.:34) is helpful in distinguishing between the two terms and locating them within an abstract model of discourse. This concept of axiology is of particular interest in SI-mediated communication, where the interpreter is an additional actor in heteroglot communication, in which one “heteroglot semiotic [is transformed] into another heteroglot semiotic via a heteroglot subject” (ibid.:12).

2. Corpus collation, transcription and analytical categories

This study draws on the above theoretical concepts to analyze a corpus collated from audio recordings of all European Parliament plenary debates during the month of September 2001, recorded via the internet page of the European Union’s broadcasting arm, Europe by Satellite. Of these debates, three were chosen for inclusion in the final corpus (hereafter referred to as the EP corpus). Selection was necessary to provide a compact and manageable corpus of approximately seven and a half hours that could be transcribed and still provide sufficient data for analysis.² Of these seven and a half hours of transcription, approximately one hour and fourteen minutes of German to English SI occurred and were analyzed. In this final ST/TT analysis, interventions from a total of twenty-one MEPs and the interpretations of five professional interpreters (two female and three male) ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Page
• Contents
• Encounters and Clashes Introduction to Translation and Ideology
• Epistemicide! The Tale of a Predatory Discourse
• The Truth about Sexual Difference Scientific Discourse and Cultural Transfer1
• Translation and Ideology A Textual Approach
• Recontextualization of News Discourse A Case Study of Translation of News Discourse on North Korea
• Translators and Translation Studies Scholars as Inoculators of Resistance1
• Interpreted Ideologies in Institutional Discourse The Case of the European Parliament
• "La Belgique vivra-t-elle?" Language and Translation Ideological Debates in Belgium (1919-1940)
• Norms, Polysystems and Ideology A Case Study
• Revisiting the Classics
• Recent Publications