CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

AND TRANSLATION STUDIES:

Recontextualization, Strategy
and Ideology
Isabela letcu-fairclough
OUTLINE

Introduction

Critical Discourse Analysis role in Translation studies and translation practice

The explanatory role that CDA concepts such as recontextualization, strategy

and ideology might play in translation practice

Translation as recontextualization relation to sociological concept of field and

agency structure dialectic that underlie the social life
Conclusion
Introduction

Fairclough is suggesting a view of translated texts as recontextulaization of

source language texts in new social and cultural contexts.
For literary translation, the new context is both cultural and political field, in
which the text will fulfil functions and goals that can be quite different from the
functions and goals it served in the source-culture and the original context.
These differences can arise from the different intentions that underlie the
production and use of a text in the target-culture and context and from
differences in the process of reception and interpretation by the new audience.
Critical Discourse analysis and Translation studies

Critical Discourse Analysis and Translation Studies share the assumption that
textual features need to be related to the social and ideological contexts of
text production and reception.
Both CDA and TS are concerned with language and its relation to the culture
and social life.
CDA is concerned in the discourse of one language and one culture while
Translations reveal the impact of discursive, social and ideological
constraints, norms and conventions in both the source and target text.
The concepts of intertextuality, interdiscursivity, recontextualization, which
play a prominent role in CDA, are especially appropriate to Translation
Studies, as both approaches aim to reveal the mediated connections
between properties of text on the one hand and socio-political-cultural
processes on the other.
 CDA uses the concept of recontextualization to designate the de-location of a
practice from its original context and its re-location within another including the
movement of discourses across practices, e.g. from political practice to media
practice.
Particular social fields and practices have their own principles or logic
according to which they recontextualize other practices and other texts. For
instance, a TV news bulletin represents real events in accordance with a certain
set of principles(which events are present or absent, foregrounded or
backgrounded); how events are ordered in the process of representation; what is
added in this process explanations, legitimizing arguments, evaluations
(Fairclough 2003: 139).
CDA calls the principle or logic of recontextualization is in fact closely
related to the purpose or goal pursued by social agents as part of their plan of
action ,and that is the (communicative purpose) of a text pursued by means of
language. But the recontextualizing field already has of course its own logic, its
own structural properties, that determine how elements from elsewhere will be
appropriated, which is why it is more accurate to say that the logic or principle
of recontextualization is in fact a sort of agency-structure dialectic.
 Recontextualization is seen in CDA as a colonization/ appropriation dialectic
which implies that recontextualized strategies, discourses, genres, etc. may
be substantially transformed through appropriation within the field of
strategic conflict (over various forms of power, symbolic capital, etc.) of the
recontextualizing context.
It is through recontextualizations of texts in new contexts, by agents having
specific purposes and goals, that the possibility of Ideological
appropriation arises. i.e. the original text, that is, might come to serve
functions and purposes that are more or less different from those it served in
the original context. Similarly, in the case of translated texts, the target-text
might in the new context differ in terms of general, pragmatic communicative
purpose or, more specifically, in terms of political purpose from the source-
text in the original context.
 Ideology is defined in CDA in relation to the concept of power. The term
ideology is not used on this view to designate only formal political ideologies
(liberalism, socialism, etc.), but representations of the world which
contribute to establishing, maintaining or changing social relations of power
or domination.
CDA seek to investigate how unequal relations of power are inscribed in and
mediated through particular instances of language use. i.e. how different
linguistic representations of one and the same event can mediate different
interpretations of and different attitudes to the event represent related to
specific interests, ideological positions and power relations. The same, of
course, applies to the choices made by translators from various alternatives
available: what may look like an uninspired translation or even a
mistranslation.
Strategy, any translation is inherently linked to a strategy, as goal-directed
behavior, whether this is a political strategy linked to power, or a strategy
that aims to achieve some other form of symbolic capital (cultural, artistic,
etc.). It is because texts function as parts of strategies of different sorts that
they can become ideological, to the extent that they attempt to reinforce or
subvert some power set-up. The very choice of the source text, as well as the
use to which the translation is put, as well as particular textual features of
the translated text can be related to the interests, aims and objectives of
social agents, and by extension to ideological agendas.
 Translation as recontextualization relation to sociological concept of field and agency
structure dialectic that underlie the social life

Schffner suggests that translations can function as part of wider strategic

functions of political language, which she identifies as: coercion, resistance,
dissimulation and (de)legitimation. Basically, fairclough suggests translations
ought to be viewed as functioning in fields, in Bourdieus (1991) sense. Fields
(e.g. the political, but also the cultural field) i.e. a literary translation may
function primarily in the cultural field but also, given the interactions
between the cultural field and other fields (the social, political, economic
fields), it will play a part in these other fields as well.
Political field

Political field

Cultural field
Economic field
 It is a fact that new genres, discourses and styles often first appear in a
culture via translation. Therefore in translated texts a CDA approach would
highlight possible differences between the orders of discourse of the source
and target-culture (e.g. what other discourses and genres exist in the two
cultures, are the two cultures equally rich and varied?), therefore the
different relational significance of the (translated) text in the two cultures.
conclusion

Translations, as recontextualized texts, ought to be related to contexts and

considered as part of strategies of action within those contexts exist in fields
of forces and contests for different forms of capital (cultural, economic,
political).
Agency-structure dialectic will govern the way in which a text is
recontextualized from one cultural context into another the thing that will
facilitate or hinder the appropriation of the source-language text. The causal
effect of these structural properties of the political and cultural fields of
target-culture will be evident in features of the translated texts (e.g. in the
choices and selections operated by translators).