Identifying political and ideological bias in translated newspaper articles

Abstract

Translation can serve the purposes of gaining, maintaining and even abusing political power in the interests of certain political groups. In order to identify political manipulation in translated texts, a text linguistics based tool called Political Bias Screener has been developed, which includes superstructure and macrostructure analysis, critical discourse analysis and political mass communication related theories. This article describes the most relevant theoretical foundations and the component models of the Screener, investigates its validity and reliability and introduces the most important research findings obtained with its help. The findings show possible tendencies of translator behaviour and are transferable to other research fields in Translation Studies.