The Deceptively Simple: Translating Donald Trump’s Posts on Twitter into Arabic

Abstract

This paper investigates the translation strategies that have been employed in translating Donald Trump’s posts on Twitter from English into Arabic, taking into consideration Trump’s use of language characterized by the excessive use of sentence fragments, colloquialism and a discourse that generally lacks cohesion. To achieve this goal, sixty-five tweets posted in 2019, and translated by two media news agencies, namely Russia Today and Anadolu Agency are analyzed to identify the translation strategies adopted by the translators affiliated to these agencies, and to determine the impact of the strategies utilized on the target language texts. The analysis of the corpora reveals that the three most predominant translation strategies adopted by the translators of the aforementioned media outlets are, in order of importance, explicitation, omission and shifts. Overall, these strategies produce target language texts that flow smoothly and succeed in transferring the messages originally expressed in the English tweets. However, on rare occasions when unnecessary omission and unmotivated shifts are adopted, the translators of Russia Today and Anadolu Agency fail to transmit the same communicative values Trump originally conveyed to his English-speaking followers.

Keywords: Social media, Twitter, Donald Trump, Translation strategies.

DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/11-22-08

Publication date: November 30^th 2021