The translation of parallelism in political speeches

Shamaileh, SF

Abstract

The Translation of Parallelism in Political Speeches
The core focus of this research centres on the rhetorical device parallelism, -which is
frequently used in Arabic, particularly in the context of political discourse. The aim of
this study is to investigate the way parallelism is dealt with when translated from Arabic
into English in terms of its function, patterns and frequency and whether it manifests an
impact on ST recipients.
The research will draw on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the investigation of the
context of the research, which centers on political discourse and argumentative text
typology. (CDA) offers involvement with ideology, in terms of belonging to a group or a
country, the need for safety, food...etc, and the fear from invasion and outsiders, which
in turn is involved in political speeches. Furthermore, (CDA) highlights significant issues
such as power and legitimacy which are the core of political discourse.
Furthermore, the researcher has opted for two tools to approach the rhetorical device in
hand, first of which is contrastive Stylistics where parallelism is investigated in both
Arabic and English political speeches as a stylistic device. Second, translation studies
which is applied to the analytical part of this study, which investigates parallelism in
original speeches in Arabic and their English translations.
The findings of the study show that parallelism is an effective rhetorical device, which
occurs in high frequency in Arabic political speeches. The results also indicate that
English uses parallelism but less frequently compared to Arabic and relies more on other
rhetorical features such as listing three elements, using contrasting elements and manipulating the use of pronouns, among others. The study concludes that parallelism
plays a significant role in Arabic political speeches and creates a greater impact on
recipients. Despite the fact that parallelism occurs less frequently in English political
speeches, it has been noticed that it is highly used in the English translation, in contrast to
what has been hypothised and this may be due to the nature of the corpus, which is
delivered by a monarch and reflects legitimacy, power and highly controlled language.

Citation

Shamaileh, S. The translation of parallelism in political speeches. (Thesis). Salford : University of Salford

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Oct 3, 2012
• Award Date: Jan 1, 2011