Emotive expressions in President Bashar Al-Assad's political speeches with an eye to translation

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the figures of speech used in Arabic political speeches as a tool of communication to gain political advantages. The analysis of the data will mainly depend on four emotive figures of speech: simile, metaphor, personification, and euphemism. Throughout the study, detailed analysis of how emotive expressions are translated from Arabic into English, maintaining the emotive content of the source texts (the written manuscript of a speech), is also examined. The Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad's political speeches are taken as a sample, (the Syrian President will be referred to here after as Al-Assad). An explanation of possible ways of rendering the emotive expressions accurately and effectively into English follows.