JAFERRER GERMAN/ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS SERVICES

The term 'ideology' has been always accompanied by its political connotation as it is evident in its dictionary definition as 'a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy' (The New Oxford Dictionary of English). Translation scholars who slant in favor of the political definitions of ideology mainly believe that translating itself is a political act as Tahir-Gьrзaglar (2003: 113) argues, 'Translation is political because, both as activity and product, it displays process of negotiation among different agents. On micro-level, these agents are translators, authors, critics, publishers, editors, and readers'. Under the influence of Marx who defines ideology as action without knowledge (false consciousness), ideology is sometimes defined in its negative political sense as 'a system of wrong, false, distorted or otherwise misguided beliefs' (van Dijk, qtd in Calzada-Pйrez, 2003: 3). In its more constructive sense, Marxists like Lenin define Socialist ideology as 'a force that encourages revolutionary consciousness and fosters progress' (Calzada-Pйrez, 2003: 4). According to Calzada-Pйrez (ibid.), recent definitions of ideology are linked with the concepts of power relations and domination, as she quotes from Eagleton: '[Ideology is] ideas and beliefs which help to legitimate the interest of a ruling group or class by distortion or dissimulation'. This view, in fact, forms the basis of post-colonial thinking which 'highlights the power relations which inform contemporary cultural exchanges' (Simon, 1996: 136). However, Calzada-Pйrez (2003) argues that sometimes ideology is viewed in more positive sense 'as a vehicle to promote or legitimate interests of a particular social group (rather than a means to destroy contenders)' (p. 5).Scholars in the field of language-related, cultural and translation studies, however, often tend to extend the concept of ideology beyond political sphere and define it in a rather politically neutralized sense as 'a set of ideas, which organize our lives and help us understand the relation to our environment' (Calzada-Pйrez, 2003: 5). In most parts of the current paper, nevertheless, the writer opts for the definition proposed by van Dijk (1996: 7) for ideology as a framework that is 'assumed to specifically organize and monitor one form of socially shared mental representation, in other words, the organized evaluative beliefs-traditionally called 'attitudes'-shared by social groups'.