Translating Idioms in Political Discourse: Translation Strategies and Semantic Categories

Abstract

This study examines the Arabic translation of 165 English idiomatic expressions in political interviews in terms of Baker’s translation strategies (2018) and investigates the deployment of idiomatic expressions in terms of semantic category based on Fernando (1996) and Kovacs (2016). The corpus of the study consists of 17 political interviews conducted in English by King Abdullah II from 2013 to 2023 and translated officially into Arabic. The results show that the paraphrasing strategy accounts for more than half the data (56.36%), followed by the strategies of ‘similar meaning but different form’ (23.63%) and ‘similar meaning and form’ (15.15%), while the omission strategy comes last at (4.84%). The analysis indicates that although the overall quality of the translation is acceptable, there are a few cases where the emotiveness of the idiomatic expressions and the appropriate genericity are underestimated. In terms of semantic category, the results reveal that the degree of opaqueness/transparency is a determining factor for choosing the translation strategy, viz., the paraphrasing strategy accounts for (82.69%) in translating opaque/semi-opaque idiomatic expressions against only (27.69%) in transparent/semi-transparent ones. The study concludes that much attention should be paid to the sensitive nature of the degree of emotiveness in idioms and the relevant generic constraints