The Language of Power in Political Commentaries: A Contrastive Study of Arabic Texts and their Translated Versions

Abstract

Cross-cultural text variation has been a major source of interest for applied linguists for decades. It has led to extensive research in translation theory and translation practices. It has been a major factor in research on contrastive rhetoric, particularly in its more recent direction companng equivalent or near-equivalent texts written in two languages. It has also been a source of educational research, addressing such issues as writing development in a second language, the development of intercultural pragmatics, and work on language. In all of these areas, one sub-theme that consistently emerges is the role of power relations, status, and solidarity in the linguistic expression of texts. The present study contributes to these text-analysis themes by exploring how power, status, and involvement relations may vary in their linguistic marking when translations of newspaper editorials are examined--in this case, English translations of Arabic editorials in Egyptian newspapers.

Press editorials are a strong resource for the study of cross-cultural translations. First, as Campbell (1998) argues, translation in press editorials represents a major role for translation and is a very common real-world activity for translators. Second, press editorial texts have a strong persuasive purpose and represent a type of written communication in which power, solidarity, and status are likely to play a major role. Third, there is considerable data on press editorials (e.g., Biber 1988, Grabe and Kaplan 1997) and some discussion of cross-cultural differences in translation with press editorials (Campbell 1998, Hatim 1997, and Hinds 1987).