critical discourse analysis of persian to english translations of book two of mathnawi by edward henry whinfield and jawid mojaddedi

Poetry translation is much more difficult than other types of translations due to its discourse and the hidden ideology behind it. currently ideological manifestations in translation process are gaining more importance in translation studies since discourse meaning is not only limited to words’ and sentences’ meaning; it is also dependent on the occasional ideological representations of the most important information of the discourse. consequently, the current study was an attempt to carry out a critical discourse analysis of two translations of rumi’s the mathnavi (book two) by whinfield (1898) and mojaddei (2007) to investigate what ideology has been implied in these translations. the research design adopted for this study was qualitative and descriptive, drawing on interpretive analysis of the data, and the corpus for this study included book two of rumi’s the mathnawi containing 115 couplets, which was edited by m.a. movahhed and was published by hermes publications in 2017, along with its english translations by whinfield (1898) and mojaddedi (2007). out of this corpus, 50 couplet were randomly selected for analysis. the selected couplets were critically analyzed in three stages (description, interpretation, and explanation) using fairclough’s model (1989); then, the ideologically laden words which appeared in the selected couplets were presented in tables, and interesting patterns which were found were explained; finally, based on the findings, a general discussion was provided. the findings indicated that the two translations were ideologically different as the two translators belonged to two different nationalities, religions, and eras.