ON MANIPULATIVE TECHNIQUES IN TRANSLATING POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Propaganda as an aggressive semiotic activity employs manipulation as the means. Both manipulation and propaganda involve not only translation of the sign per se but, first and foremost, transformation of the context of the sign.

It can be well explained by a semiotic approach based on Ch. Peirce theory, but Ch. Pierce focuses on the sign but doesn’t question the context the relevance of which to translation is paramount.

To adapt the Piercian conception to a semiotic description of the professional activities of translators we apply his interpretants to the context of the sign as well. Consequently, the immediate context shall be the SL text effecting an impression on the translator as either familiar / precedential or unfamiliar / precedentless or intricate / plain. The dynamic context shall develop in a course of pretranslational analysis. The final context of the SL sign should be reflective of the way in which most of the minds would interpret the SL context. In a translation governed by the Principle of Cooperation the final SL context must get communicated in TL so that there be an equality of the SL and the TL final contexts.

The obvious variability of sign-to-context relations renders the translating techniques open to manipulation.

An extreme example of manipulation techniques herewith is set by political commentaries of the Russian president’s Vladimir Putin public discourse in western media. We have analyzed samplings of Putin’s statements along with their subsequent commentaries by the USA and British media sources to have detected the following three techniques:

1) RR, or reframing of the SL final context as well as reframing of the SL sign.

2) RpR, or reframing of the SL final context and partial reframing of the SL sign

3) RT, or reframing of the SL final context and translation of the SL sign.

The examples analyzed in the paper are representative of three manipulation techniques used in political translation. All three manifest conflicts of political ideologies, and, therefore, prefer confrontation to cooperation; the TL final contexts are framed by the TL stereotypes that streamline the public opinion as planned by professional propagandists.

Keywords: Manipulation, political translation, manipulative techniques, semiotics