Exploring semiotics of manipulating translation on stereotypical implications: A case study of  The Fitna movie

The aim of the present study is to explore manipulation in the subtitled version of ‘The Fitna’ movie released in Western mass media. To accomplish this, the film was analyzed to see how visual semiotics was applied to represent the stereotypical implications in Islam to Western audience. To define manipulation, this study drew on van Dijk's cognitive approach to manipulation in the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) which maintains that manipulating people involves manipulating their minds, that is, people's beliefs, such as their knowledge, opinions and ideologies which, in turn, control their actions. Following the CDA approach, it is hypothesized that among the manipulative techniques available to translators, Re/De-contextualization has been widely applied to form a "preferred mental model" for Western audience through which Islam is perceived negatively in English. The results show that five translated texts of the Quran have been used in the film. The Analysis of translated texts based on hypothetical model of translational manipulation in developing news stories showed that the translated texts have been re-contextualized, spreading stereotype by constructing a new mental model.