Political Discourse and Subtitling : A Trump Case Study

Audiovisual Translation (AVT) has become more significant in current times of mass communication through media broadcasting and social media. This thesis is a practical AVT translation and commentary on Trump’s 2016 speech at a rally in the State of Florida. This speech was chosen due to its political significance since it came out at a sensitive time prior to the U.S. 2016 presidential election. The English Source Text (ST) was published in video format. This research conducted the translation and subtitling of the selected speech with respect to the Arabic Target Text’s (TT) translation and subtitling conventions. This practical commentary aims to locate the elements that distinguish the ST, as well as to determine the proper strategies to transfer them to the TT throughout translation and subtitling. To achieve this, the commentary draws a connection between the psychology behind the speech and the success of the ST. In doing so, three key elements were identified to be transferred into the TT: Trump’s informal register, style, and dynamics of pitch variability.

This commentary is divided into translation and subtitling. The first area of focus, translation, involves examining the strategies used in translating metaphorical and socio-political cultural references. Metaphors were rendered with Pederson’s taxonomy, and socio-political cultural references were rendered with Cintas and Remael’s taxonomy for translation through their addition of information strategy. The second area of focus, subtitling, tackles the challenges faced while transferring Trump’s informal register, style, and dynamics of pitch variability with respect to the TII’s (Translation and Interpreting Institute) Arabic subtitling conventions.

This study concludes that the most suitable approach to tackle translating and subtitling the political discourse genre is to draw a balance between transferring the elements of the ST, while respecting the linguistic features of the TT. Keeping in mind the importance of giving the Target Audience (TA) a similar experience to the Source Audience (SA).