TV simultaneous interpreting of emotive overtones in Arabic presidential political speeches into English during the Arab Spring.

Despite the vast research on simultaneous interpreting in different settings, little is known about interpreting practices in the field of TV, particularly between Arabic and English. The recent events of the Arab Spring led to more reliance on simultaneous interpreting for broadcasting presidential speeches live to audiences worldwide. Emotive overtones were a salient feature in the Arabic-language speeches and posed challenges to the TV interpreters who had to handle other difficulties and constraints involved in the task. The current study aims to investigate the way TV interpreters, who worked in the simultaneous mode, handled the task of conveying the emotive overtones employed in Arabic-language political speeches into English. It also aims to examine the difficulties and challenges that emerged during this process and might have influenced the interpreters’ choices. The study also evaluates the way the TV interpreters handled this task and whether the original emotive effect was maintained, upgraded, downgraded or abandoned in their renditions. To achieve its aims, the study analysed a corpus of four Arabic presidential political speeches delivered during the Arab Spring, along with their English simultaneous interpretations produced by different international TV stations. The analysis relied on a macro framework and a micro framework. The macro framework presents an overview of the wider context of the Arabic-language speeches and the individual speakers to help understand the linguistic choices made by the speakers. The micro framework investigates the linguistic tools which were employed by the speakers to stir people’s emotions. The study analyses the Arabic-language speeches through applying emotive categories which are based on Shamaa’s (1978) classification of emotive meaning according to their linguistic level: phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic and lexical levels. The micro level also investigates the strategies which were used by the TV interpreters to render the emotive linguistic tools into English. By adopting a qualitative approach, the study aims to contribute to a better understanding of TV simultaneous interpreting between Arabic and English, as well as the practices of TV interpreters when working into their B language and rendering emotiveness.