An Assessment of Translation of Doublespeak in Political Discourse into Arabic

Abstract

Doublespeak, an omnipresent feature of political discourse, faces challenges when translated into Arabic. The principal objective of this research is to evaluate the quality of doublespeak translation into Arabic, considering both linguistic and cultural nuances. A corpus of six English political discourses and their translation was analyzed according to four strategies: euphemism, jargon, gobbledygook and inflated language to identify the categories of the doublespeak. Translation procedures are applied to these translations in order to evaluate the effectiveness of translation such as literal translation, transposition, equivalence, modulation and adaptation. The results indicate that the translation of doublespeak is a nuanced task and the translator should have comprehensive knowledge of the source and target language, as well as the cultural context the doublespeak is being used. The findings of this research suggest that some translations do not take into consideration the cultural nuances, using neutral way or adopt new situation in translation is a successful method to avoid cultural difficulties, using some strategies can reveal or down play the doublespeak and there are different motivations for using doublespeak such as political, personal, security and military. This research recommends that Vinay and Darbelnet model of translation is an effective tool in decoding the obscuring, disguising or misleading the meaning of the text.