The Translatability of Emotiveness in Hosni Mubarak's Political Speech From Arabic to English

The present paper endeavors to investigate the problems translators face when rendering emotive political lexical items and expressions from Arabic to English. Hosni Mobarak's speech and its translations are analyzed to discuss the degree of difficulty in translating emotive meanings as well as assessing the translation strategies adopted to transfer the emotive meanings from Arabic to English. The paper emphasizes that certain cultural nuances and emotional connotations can be challenging to convey and often require specific strategies as the emotive words are often culture-bound items. The analysis of the translations shows that this Arabic political text is teeming with high emotive meanings which cannot be rendered with the same emotive force into English. The study also reveals that achieving the same emotive effect on target text receivers is often challenging, and the emotive force of those connotations are often lost or untranslated.