Representation of social actors in Chinua Achebe’s novel “Things fall apart” and its two persian translations

Representation of social actors in Chinua Achebe’s novel “Things fall apart” and its two persian translations

Esmat Babaii                                                          Maliheh Rashed
Kharazmi University, Iran                                    Kharazmi University, Iran
 
 
Abstract: This paper discusses the feasibility of employing a discourse-based approach in examining the (un)successful portrayal of a given socio-cultural context through translation. In so doing, instances of two Persian translations of Chinua Achebe’s post-colonial novel “Things Fall Apart” were selected to
illustrate the congruence as well as incongruence of translations with their source text. Van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2008) model of representation of social actors was used as the analytical framework and proved to work well for the aims of the study. The implications of using a discourse-based approach, along with possible future directions, are discussed.
 
Keywords: discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, social actors, translation studies, post-colonialism, self- and other-representation