REPRESENTACIONES TÉCNICAS Determinación de honorarios:

The subsection builds on the historical view of the practice of translation under the rule of different successive government preceding the Kurdistan regional government (KRG) in the north of Iraq outlined above, which illustrates the interplay between historical and current socio- political factors and their impacts on translators’ behaviour today. It builds on this by presenting an overview of the latest studies of Kurdish media, geopolitical ideology and power relations in Iraqi Kurdistan in order to provide further justification for conducting this study, arguing that Kurdish media translation has thus far received little attention.

The Kurdish media is of great significance in Kurdish society, particularly since the 1990s with the establishment of an autonomous region in northern Iraq. As explained in the previous subsections, since 1992 media facilities have been run by the Kurdish government and political parties, including the two major ruling parties (PDK and PUK) and, from 2008, the Gorran opposition party. For a long time, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (PDK) has governed Hawler (Irbil) and Dhok’s provinces, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) has governed Sulaimania province. However, the Gorran opposition party surprisingly won the majority of votes in the province of Sulaimania in the Kurdish national assembly on July 25, 2009, KRG election. Following these dramatic changes in Kurdish society, the Kurdish media represents a means of investigating the language used in the field of translation in order to reveal the wide political and socio-cultural implications impacting on Kurdish translators’ behaviours. Their decisions represent the source words of others and are restricted and guided by textual and extra- textual factors, such as commissioners (patrons), norms, audience expectations and target text functions. In addition, they are affected by translators’ “own sociocultural and educational background, ideological, phraseological and idiosyncratic stylistic preferences” (Munday 2012a, p.2). However, previous studies have usually ignored translation that blurs the difference

translation studies. Part of this study’s original contribution lies in the way it identifies what can be gained by taking translation into account while investigating the language used in media texts in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Kurdish media in Iraqi Kurdistan has attracted some researchers’ attention after the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003, including Mawlood’s 2011 work, The Impact of the Press Law

2008 on the Role of Journalism in the Kurdistan Region post-2003; and Sheyholislami’s 2011

book, Kurdish Identity, Discourse, and New Media. In the field of translation, very little research has been conducted beyond Salih’s (2014) work on the use of English and Kurdish connectives in newspaper articles. Birot (2012) has undertaken some work on the role of ideology in translation and Kurdish media in Iraqi Kurdistan via newspaper articles. Nevertheless, the role of ideology in this field, especially in geopolitical commentary articles, has not yet been studied academically. This study thus opens new and important research questions, arguing that media translation has an influential role in shaping the values, ideas, and belief systems in Kurdish society and it might be used as a manipulative tool in favour of different geopolitical media agencies. The translated texts selected for this study provide an introduction to the many ideological struggles over the nature, meaning and cause of contemporary contextual changes. The aim is to reveal the hidden ideology of geopolitical knowledge which leads to the use of a series of repeated translational strategies in Kurdish media translation. This, in turn, not only shapes translators’ behaviour and discursive choices, but also reveals various historical and socio-political dynamics behind the interactions between the Kurdish political blocs, successive authorities and the media in the Kurdish semi- autonomous region, and considers the particular circumstances in which Kurdish translators currently operate.

As with many complex and multifaceted cultural concepts, ideology has many possible definitions. Following Lefevere approach (1992b) and van Dijk’s approach (1998a)18_{, ideology}

in the context of Kurdish studies can be defined in relation to language, society and culture including factors such as power, politics and religion. The language and texts used within the field of Kurdish media are thus considered to reflect socio-cultural messages and power

relations. In translation studies, it can be argued that the kinds of translations that occur, as texts move along the sociocultural, political and media chain, are usually dependent on the interests and objectives of the existing dominant power and context into which the discourse is being re- contextualised. They reflect the translator’s mediation in relation to ideological manipulation in translation studies19_{. The Kurdish media, likewise, might reflect a wide political, socio-cultural}

context which has its own impact on the translations produced within this field. In Iraqi Kurdistan, they are often the result of different geopolitical ideologies. Their representation could be expected to follow diverse goals and be shaped by different strands of socio-political arguments on the past, present and future of Kurdish society.

Meanwhile, the breadth of knowledge on journalism as an occupation and the adoption of respective techniques post-Hussein’s regime in 2003 has led to changes in the modes of representation and the diversification of images in the Kurdish media. Describing Kurdish media productions, Fischer-Tahir (2013, p. 30) argues that “the process of transforming ‘occurrences in the everyday world […] into stories’ highly depends on the institutional organisational and personal interests of the media producers”. This might also be true for the media translation practise in Iraqi Kurdistan. Apart from radio and television, different Kurdish print publications and the internet sources strive to affect public discourse by selecting and prioritising topics for translation in order to convey certain beliefs and have particular impacts. Therefore, the investigation of the notion of ideology within Kurdish media in general and Kurdish media translation, in particular, is not so much interested in the specific activities depicted in a single newspaper, or media agency. For ideological analysis, the key is the fit between the sense and words within a number of media texts translated by different publication agencies in order to define various reflections, including socio-cultural and political issues. Due to the current political status of Kurdistan, which is a dynamic and ever-changing process, the effect of these particular types of translation in the world of geopolitics is more prominent and of critical importance.

Geopolitics can be defined as “a view or a mode of politics with an active concern for the overall planetary scheme of life” (Beaugrande 1994, p.5). In this sense, geopolitical texts

disclose knowledge about a region and often motivate geopolitical theory and practice economically, environmentally and so forth. For Dalby et al. (1998), “geopolitical texts are not “neutral” writings from a detached position outside politics, history or geography, attempting to answer a single commonly agreed upon “question” (p. 311). In today’s Kurdish media, they are of interest to the public because they seem to promise unusual insight into the future direction of international affairs and the coming shape of the Kurdish political map. However, specifications of the relationship between geography, power, ideology and translation vary considerably as geopolitical visionaries vie with each other to delimit a “new geopolitics.” For some, the current political status of Kurdistan has allowed the emergence of new geopolitical media dominated by territorial struggles between competing blocs and nationalism. This, in turn, might be reflected in the field of Kurdish media translation when the production of geopolitical discourse is treated by translators as part of politics itself and not as a neutral and detached description of a transparent objective reality. In this sense, ideology might not only be “located in the translated text […], but also in the voice and position of the translator” (Tymoczko 2010, p. 213). This study, therefore, argues that ideology might reside in the geographical and temporal stance of the Kurdish translators and govern their choices along with their cultural and ideological affiliations. It raises several questions as regards the producers of these particular types of translations and their impacts, the way they move from the field of ideology to that of media texts and the extent to which the knowledge producers are imbricated with issues of ideology and power. This might be due to the fact that these “translations are not made in vacuum. Translators function in a given culture at given time. The way they understand themselves and their cultures is one of the factors that may influence the way in which they may translate” (Lefevere 1992a, p.14).

In the context of this study then, ideology assumes a primary position and becomes an important analytical tool and common ground which reflects the occurrence of different (re)framings by varied users and reframing strategies for different purposes. The observation of such behaviours not only leads to the observation of patterns and trends in Kurdish media translation at a particular period of time, but also allows the study to elaborate a more intricate picture of the positioning of translators and embed them in the existing political reality. Media translation is, therefore, examined as the act of comprehending a context, socially, politically and culturally by translators and rendering it into another language and culture. It reflects the

role of contextual factors in Kurdish translators’ decision in relation to the lexico-grammatical choices and how their acceptance, refusal, or modification affect the Kurdish language development and non-standardisation and vice versa.

In sum, the section above has shown that the wide practice of translation for the general public (in the public sphere) from English into Kurdish is not new in Iraqi Kurdistan. However, its practice as an independent and emancipated activity on a limited scale is fairly new and dates back to the 2000s. The section also revealed that Kurdish translators might be under various pressure to make difficult decisions regarding lexico-grammatical choices and finding sufficient lexical resources in order to translate from foreign languages, particularly English. Kurdish non- standardisation results in the lack of, and need for a common ground in terms of how to keep this language updated with the passage of time as new ideas, technologies and translations arise and how to adopt and spell loan words, calques and so forth. Hasanpoor (1999, p. 40) elucidates that “translations have enriched the language with the adoption of new concepts, loans, neologisms, and the introduction of punctuation and stylistic codes”. It can be argued that Hassanpour's statement refers to Kurdish translation in general. However, this study is consistent with what he argues regarding the lack of studies of the contributions and limitations of translated works. The contributions of translation choices and ideology, especially in media translation, have not yet been studied. Translation choices in relation to the meaning focus may be considered as “nothing but arbitrary since there is no reason why a particular perspective should be favoured over competing interpretations” (Strugielska and Siek-Piskozub 2013, p. 20). This makes the present study important and exigent since this study argues that Kurdish translation choices are driven by ideology and according to Lefevere (1992a, p. 14) “ideology is often enforced by the patrons, the people or institutions who commission or publish translations”. Although the existence of a number of translated texts in the public sphere is insufficient for today’s growing market demand, nevertheless, the mainstream media has continued to grow over the last decade and the translation demand in Kurdistan is ever rising. For this reason, Kurdish media translation in Kurdistan deserves a more detailed review so that challenges and obstacles to translators’ decisions in the region can be identified. In addition, the development of Kurdish language and also translation studies has still to be consolidated. The Kurdish language needs to be promoted, especially in terms of its standardisation and language

of language use in writing in that language. In the Kurdish language, to a great extent, norms are considered to be an outcome of spontaneous exchanges between writers and editors (translators and editors) over a certain period of time, rather than following guidelines offered by an academy or language policy, which does not exist. In the field of translation, this leads to a state of confusion and makes the translators believe that they can do what they want in terms of lexical choices. However, it is undeniable that language standardisation and unification in Kurdish is a gradual process and requires research into different aspects of that language.