«Resistance, Resilience, and Collaboration» in World War II Newspapers: Exploring Intertextuality and British Political Discourse in Persian News Translations

Geopolitical unrest, socio-economic challenges, a leadership shift, and the presence of Allied forces characterised the mid-20th-century Iran during the Second World War. This chapter examines intertextuality in news articles of the Iranian newspapers Ettelaat and Kayhan. They were founded during the Pahlavi reign, supported state policies and played a significant role in reflecting and influencing World War news. This research provides insight into how news translation, power dynamics, and intertextuality interact in the newspapers, underlining how knowledge is produced, shaped, and disseminated within a broader network of interconnected discourses. Through a structural analysis of discourse strands (Siegfried Jäger, 2016) at the macro level, I disentangle the web of discourse strands in different opinion pieces to understand the broader socio-political landscape within which these newspapers operated. At the micro level, I delve into news translation practices and their role in shaping war discourse. This study discusses one of the disentangled discourse strands, ‘resilience, resistance and collaboration,’ which is directly linked to wartime challenges. The results show that the newspapers employed different intertextual references to address, evaluate, and criticise domestic and international challenges. In the translations, the main messages of English political and news discourses are maintained; however, they are frequently simplified, summarised, sensationalised, and occasionally ideologically manipulated. Intertextuality functions at different levels in the newspapers to lend credibility, evoke emotions, (de) legitimise claims and arguments, and persuade readers to take or refrain from specific actions. The study contributes to media discourse studies by exemplifying how journalism is a site for negotiating power, identity, and resistance in this specific historical period in Persia and offers insights into how the newspapers reflect and shape realities and opinions.