Translating Emotional Collocations in Selected Presidential Speeches during the Arab Spring: A Socio-emotional Perspective.

Translating emotional collocations, in presidential speeches, is a problematic task. This study draws attention to the pressing need for an effective translation of emotional collocations in political discourse. It is an endeavor to tackle the problems of Arabic-English translation of emotional collocations in four presidential speeches delivered by Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi during the very beginning of the Arab Spring. It sheds light on how TV translators deal with emotional collocations, the strategies that have been observed, the challenges which may influence the translators’ choices and the implications of these choices on the original emotional effect. The data is organized in chronological order according to the date of the delivery of the selected speeches. An interdisciplinary approach is adopted: Venuti's foreignization and domestication (1995), Vinay & Darbelnet (1995) and Baker (2018). The results reveal that out that out of 33 examples, the translators have adopted a domesticating approach to render 19 collocations and a foreignizing approach to handle 14 collocations. It also observed that translators resort to adjusting the intended meaning of emotional collocations, using the paraphrase, modulation, amplification and substitution strategies. Such strategies greatly influence the emotive effect of the translations. Finally, the study implies that, in translating presidential speeches, maintaining the emotive effect of a given emotional collocation is as significant as conveying its content.Key words: translating emotion language, emotional collocation, domestication vs. foreignization, emotive effect