Multimodal translation analysis: Arab Spring speeches in Arabic and English

Abstract

In the contemporary globalized world, translation plays a key role in sharing news across the globe, in particular in the age of multimedia, where meaning is transferred through various modes and genres. This study focuses on two Arab Spring speeches of Mummar Algaddafi’s and Hosni Mubarak’s and their translations in different media. The thesis initially conducts a comparative study of the source texts (STs), including a textual/contextual analysis drawing on Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, and on Gunther Kress’ multimodal analysis. This is followed by examining the target texts (TTs) to investigate the inventible changes that occur during the translation process, particularly if the translation involves not only a transfer of meaning from Arabic to English but also from mode to mode (such as, speaking to writing) and genre to genre (a political speech to a newspaper article). The thesis introduces the Multimodal Translation Analysis model to investigate the following aspects of the TTs: linguistic aspects of the TTs, the TT’s multimodal qualities, and, drawing on Mona Baker’s narrative theory, the role of dominant narratives in the shaping of the TT

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