Research Review on Ideological factors in Public Diplomacy Discourse Translation

Abstract

At the end of the 1980s, translation studies began to show a cultural turn, with the research focus shifted to the cultural origin of translation and exploring ideological factors in translation. While ideology in translation has at large been discussed in translation studies, little research has been conducted to examine the role of ideology in public diplomacy discourse translation. As a communicative tool, translation can bridge or divide the gap between two different worlds at the ideological level, which means that the translation involving discourse reconstruction can be indicative of the ideology of the translator. In public diplomacy discourse translation, the use of degree adverbials reflects the translator's ideological factors, including common knowledge of stereotypes, cognitive preference, assertions to others, and use of first-person-based (egocentric) concepts of spatial orientation and metaphorical extensions of those concepts. Therefore, this paper first provides an overview of theoretical frameworks about ideology in translation studies. Second, the review discusses the previous studies on public diplomacy discourse translation. Furthermore, it reviews the definition, functions, rating scale, and internal ideological factors of degree adverbials. This review finds that taking adverbs of degree as the research object to study the translation strategies in public diplomacy discourse translation is a worthy research direction, not only exploring how translators manipulate different translation strategies of degree adverbs to reconstruct different discourse effects but also can studying the ideological factors for different translation strategies by the translator.