Description
Ideological perspectives in translated museum discourses
Eleftherios Antoniou
MA ‘Translation: Greek, English, Russian’
The research focuses on translation as a resource for constructing ideological narratives found in the Russian and English versions of two museum website, namely, The ‘Bunker 42 Museum of Cold War, in Moscow, and The Museum of the Occupation in Latvia. The theoretical framework in this paper is the critical discourse theory and discourse historical approach (Fairclough 1997, Wodak 1999) which present the growing interest in the textual and discursive manifestations of ideologies and in their specific linguistic realizations in discourse. These approaches mediate between linguistic structures as evident in a text and the social, political, and historical contexts of text production and reception. The data sets, selected in 2020 for the purposes of the study, comprised a source text of 1,965 words translated into English (2,413 words). They show how translators favour intended meaning, through discourse choices, disseminating intended historical narratives, which are aligned with the ideological transition of societies which the museums are a channel of. The study shows that the English translations are ‘westernized’ versions of the source slavo-centric Russian discourses, manifesting that the ‘iron curtain between the East and the West’ has been drawn, regardless of substantial ideological shifts traced in Russian and English translated museum discourses.
