Lexical Incongruity in Translations of American Political Speeches into Arabic: Between Presidents Bush and Obama

Hannouna, Yasmin H.

doi:10.22425/jul.2010.11.2.71

J. Univers. Lang. 2010; 11(2):71-148

pISSN: 1598-6381

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22425/jul.2010.11.2.71

Article

Lexical Incongruity in Translations of American Political Speeches into Arabic: Between Presidents Bush and Obama

Yasmin H. Hannouna ¹

Author Information & Copyright ▼

¹UAE University

Copyright ⓒ 2016, Sejong University Language Research Institue. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published Online: Jan 01, 2017

Abstract

This paper endeavors to investigate the extent to which it is possible to handle the translation of emotive political lexical items which have only partial or no equivalents in the target language in terms of componential analysis as a procedure of translation (Newmark 1981: 20; 1988: 115). Two professional translators participate in translating the sample texts extracted from some political speeches delivered by the American Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama for the highly emotive expressions they contain. The procedure of the study is entirely based on the analysis and comparison of two suggested translations of each sample text. The results show that Arabic political items are charged with high emotive meanings. Further, a translator should be culturally and linguistically competent in languages to produce effective and adequate translations.

Keywords: emotiveness; political speeches; translation equivalence; connotation; lexical incongruity; componential analysis

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