RECONSTRUCTING POLITICAL VOICE THROUGH TRANSLATION: A TRANSITIVITY-BASED ANALYSIS OF TWO ENGLISH RENDERINGS OF MAHMOUD DARWISH’S IDENTITY CARD
Keywords:
Darwish’s Identity Card, Political Discourse In Translation, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Transitivity System, Translator Visibility And IdeologyAbstract
This study examines how political meaning is grammatically reconstructed in translation through a comparative transitivity-based analysis of two English renderings of Mahmoud Darwish’s Bitaqat Hawiyyah (Identity Card), translated by Denys Johnson-Davies and by Salman Masalha and Vivian Eden. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), particularly Halliday’s transitivity system, the paper demonstrates that variations in process types, participant roles, and circumstantial choices produce distinct representations of identity, agency, and resistance. Although both translations derive from the same Arabic source, they enact different ideological positions, shifting the poem’s political force from a controlled testimonial stance to an intensified and confrontational discourse of resistance. By incorporating Venuti’s concept of translator visibility, the study foregrounds the translator as an active ideological agent whose grammatical decisions shape how political voice is perceived in the target text. The research contributes to translation studies and SFL-based discourse analysis by showing that political meaning is not merely transferred but actively reconstituted within translation itself.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Mumtaz, Rameesha Riaz, Ubaidullah Abid Qazi (Author)
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