Investigating mediation in translation

The notion of mediation has been widely discussed in translation studies (e.g., Farghal 1993; Hatim and Mason 1990, 1997; Munday 2007) since it was first proposed by de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981). The actual means whereby mediation occurs in the translation process, however, remains unresolved. This chapter intends to fill this gap. The value of this intervention lies in no small part in the ability of the idea of mediation to frame the translation process as a continuous compromise among various translating parties, and hence to foreground the power struggle underlying any translation activity. Primarily informed by critical discourse analysis, text linguistics, and systemic functional linguistics, the paper develops a theoretical framework of mediation, which consists of a micro-and a macro-analytical model. The micro-model focuses on how mediation is carried out at the two stages of translation (i.e., the stage of information selection and configuration and the stage of information presentation) to bear upon the world presented in the source text; whilst the macro-model places mediation in a wider social context of the interactive relationship between mediation, power, ideology and norms.