The Translation of Yasser Arafat’s Political Speech in the UN 1974 with an Eye to the Obvious Visibility of Ideological Manipulation

This descriptive research shed the light on the translation of political speeches, and explained how
ideology controlled this process by the use of semantic and syntactic features. It also revealed how
ideology shaped receivers’ worldviews. The data was collected from Yasser Arafat's political speech in
the UN in 1974 and its translation into English. The collected data was analyzed following the
deconstruction and feminism theories. This research concluded that the translation of political
speeches was a process of justified, conscious, deliberate, and subtle manipulation due to the fact that
translation was influenced by intra-lingual and extra-lingual aspects. In other words, the translation of
political speeches was not a mono- effort; the ideology of translators and commissions, the target
audience and culture, as well as the intended purpose of the TT played an essential role in translating
political speeches. Henceforth, translation of political speeches could be described as an externally and
internally determined process.