Manipulation of Narratives in Translated Political Texts: The Reflection of Iran’s Political News in the West-supported Media

In the current world, some people are affected by narratives that are mostly made by the media. News media is one of the areas in which narration plays a significant role. In news media, narration is used as a tool to describe an event in the line with specific interests and thoughts, which, can be manipulated by different human agents, including translators. Therefore, the current study, relying on Baker's narrative theory (2006), aims to investigate translators’ role in narrative manipulation of translated news texts. To achieve this goal, 200 Persian news texts were collected along with their English translations in Western news media. Then original texts and their translations were analyzed using Baker’s framing strategies. After analyzing data, it became clear that narration is a tool to create a new identity of a person, group, organization, government or even a country. Furthermore, research has shown that narratives, in a subtle way, can lead the audiences toward a predefined goal. It was also found that among Baker's framing strategies, "selective appropriation" is mostly used and "labeling" is the least used strategy.