Hedging in Obama's Political Memoir, "A Promised Land" - Translation and Commentary

This thesis focuses on my translation of a part of chapter (25) of A Promised Land, a political memoir written by Barack Obama in November 2020, in which he narrates events taking place during his presidency years between 2009-2017, focusing particularly on his political career. In the chapter chosen for translation, Obama focuses on narrating various events occurring in or related to the Middle East, especially that his years in office witnessed some momentous developments and upheavals in the Middle East, including the so-called Arab Spring and change of long-lasting regimes in some Arab countries alongside developments related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My translation is preceded by a critical analysis that discusses the strategies used to capture the hedging instances in the source text and the author’s concealed stance by using Martin and White’s Appraisal Framework, which was based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). In my analysis, I focused on two areas that fall under the notion of Engagement in this Framework, namely (1) Attribution and (2) Modality. I also discussed another related strand, which is the area of Agency, which emerges from a wider concept in SFG, i.e., Transitivity. By using those tools, I aim to produce a target text that maintains a comparable level of subtlety of the ideology of the source text, without any interference in the author’s stance or any attempt to distort it, but rather show it.