Problematic of Translating Political Discourse in Media: Barack Obama's Speech as a Case Study

This study investigates the problem of translating political discourse in media with a specific reference to "Barack Obama's Speech as a Case Study". Moreover, it highlights the characteristics of political discourse as well as the strategies and techniques of translating such type of discourse which requires different ways a translator can follow to achieve an acceptable translation. The present study adopts a descriptive and analytical approach. Its main focus is the concept of translatability of political texts. The translations of Obama’ speech from English into French and Arabic will be carefully examined and compared with its corresponding ST segments. The analysis will focus on the strategies used by the translator to render that political speech adequately. Furthermore, varied political expressions along with their translations will be analyzed to identify the type of equivalents they feature, the translator’s choices that affect the ST, and the factors that influence the translation of these expressions. The findings reveal that such text type is a very important genre which makes the process of translating such texts problematic for translators. On the one hand, the researcher finds that the translator used semantic translation strategy in translating most political expressions. On the other hand, since there is a lack of equivalence for cultural bound expressions, the translator used pragmatic translation for such expressions.