Translating ideational meaning in political texts : a systemic functional perspective

Abstract EN

Political texts are unlike other texts as they ''are a part and/orthe results of political events", and they are historically andculturally produced in which politics is the main subjectmatter (Schäffner, 2001: 133).

Transferring meaning of suchtext types in the translation process is difficult for translatorsdue to specific terminologies, expressions and linguisticstructure.

Regarding meaning, Systemic FunctionalLinguistics (henceforth SFL) identifies three kinds ofmeaning of language, namely, Ideational, Interpersonal andTextual.

The major focus of this research is the Ideationalmeaning.

From this perspective, this paper applies SFL toanalyze and discuss the patters of equivalence and shift thatare employed to transfer the Ideational meaning of journalistictexts, political texts in particular, in translating from Englishinto Kurdish.

With a corpus of 8 pairs of English source textsand their Kurdish translations, the analysis shows that anumber of patterns are used to reproduce the source clausalIdeational meaning in the target texts.

Finally, the study endswith the main findings and Political texts are unlike other texts as they ''are a part and/orthe results of political events", and they are historically andculturally produced in which politics is the main subjectmatter (Schäffner, 2001: 133).

Transferring meaning of suchtext types in the translation process is difficult for translatorsdue to specific terminologies, expressions and linguisticstructure.

Regarding meaning, Systemic FunctionalLinguistics (henceforth SFL) identifies three kinds ofmeaning of language, namely, Ideational, Interpersonal andTextual.

The major focus of this research is the Ideationalmeaning.

From this perspective, this paper applies SFL toanalyze and discuss the patters of equivalence and shift thatare employed to transfer the Ideational meaning of journalistictexts, political texts in particular, in translating from Englishinto Kurdish.

With a corpus of 8 pairs of English source textsand their Kurdish translations, the analysis shows that anumber of patterns are used to reproduce the source clausalIdeational meaning in the target texts.

Finally, the study endswith the main findings and conclusions