Dear Concepcion,

As you have rightly mentioned, Text generation is primarily dependent upon the hidden sociocultural norms of text producers. Understanding such norms is crucial when translating from source language into the target language. It is interesting to note that the complexity of the task is doubly confounded when the translator's ideology intervenes. Consequently, researching the discrepancies resulting from translator's ideological inclinations Is a worthwhile area of research  which invariably involves  a critical discourse analysis approach.

Wish you good luck with your research. 

Best regards,

R. Biria

You need to go a bit more basic to answer  this question properly. Any written text, whether it's persuasive (like propaganda) or informative, is the explicit representation of an implicit concept. (See work by the Japanese researcher Ikujiro Nonaka about explicit and implicit knowledge).

So if you want to decently translate a written text, you would need to ifnd out what the implicit meaning is of that text. And recreate the explicit meaning of that implicit knowledge from the base, not from the already written text. If you do the latter, you would get Implicit Knowledge, Explicitly written down in Japanese, again made Implicit by the translator, to again be explicitly written down. Thats 2 steps more than the original message, and thus causes problems.

I can imagine that it would be hard to find the writers of those WW2 propagandists seen as they are most likely dead, but this is an accurate way to translate in my opinion.

Propaganda messages must follow the same tone as the original so as to give readers insight into the level of intimidation and psychological imposition experienced by the people who were subjected to them in another language. As far as possible the translation should be faithful even to connotations of the language. Translations should not make them more polite or less intimidatory.

Tariq Rahman

Absolutely right. We have examples from the lexicon of heresy from the Muslim world as a further example of seemingly pious language, to which the ordinary people respond positively, being used to curtail rights and actually kill people. I think even a gloss is required in a footnote explaining the implications of the original document for people to understand how the surface text conceals sinister sub-texts.

Thank you all for your kind responses,

Dear Biria and Rahman, I absolutely agree to approach the translation with glosses for word explanation and a discourse analysis approach in order to present the original document in all its features.

all of you suggested with different types of propaganda and discourse analysis, I particularly appreciate Spoeltra's suggestion to take reference from Ikujiro Nonaka research that I will read with pleasure.

Regarding the translation approach I suddenly remembered Orwell's 1984, therefore I'm glad that someone thought about the same "newspeak" as I did.

Thank you for your hints on USSR's nomenclature and also Rahman for your suggestion on Muslim lexicon which helped me to focus on a wider range of propaganda approach outer my experience field.

Thank you all again, I hope that my doubt could have been an interesting chance to open new paths.

I agree with Tariq.  A footnote in this regard, explaining the implicit, implicature and import of polyphony in propaganda messages will be useful.