Trumpsaltion : a relevance theoretic approach to the challenges posed by Arabic simultaneous interpreters of president Donald Trump's first presidential debate

Abstract EN

The present paper aims at shedding light on the challenges which simultaneous interpreters encounter when rendering President Donald Trump's speechesinto Arabic(Trumpslations).

The study also attempts to identify the strategies employed by the interpreters when rendering Trump's awkwardstatements into Arabic.

The data is collected from Clinton, Trumps Clash in the first Debate; several challenging cases, within their context, were selected randomly from his speeches.

The Arabic interpretations of these cases by one of the leading news agencies, Sky News Arabia, were compared to the original texts and were analyzed to check accuracy, acceptability and comprehensibility.

Gutt's (1990, 1991 & 1998) relevance approach has beenused as a framework for this study.

The hypothesis is that the selected ambiguous statements of Trump do perplex the interpreterswho exert lots of efforts to decipher them, but the inevitable result is erroneously interpreting these statements by both the interpreters and the receivers due to lack of understanding on the part of the interpreters.

The study reveals that Trump's speeches are characterized with confusing lexical items, language-mingling form, fast talking pace, and yell-talks.

The study concludes that omission and elaboration have been the most recurrent translation strategies employed by interpreters when dealing with the awkward statements.