Decoding Ideology: Simultaneous Interpreting in Political Speeches

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of ideology on simultaneous interpreting, specifically in speeches that are politically loaded. It delves into the difficulties interpreters encounter when the political context of the original speech interacts with their personal or institutional ideology. It deals with the elusive relationship between ideologies in the present and the contemporary understanding of them, which will be demonstrated through examples from US president Donald Trump political appearance against Qatar. Based on the concepts of ideology and language, ideology and politics, and interpretation methods, this paper conveys how ideological elements affect the perception of political discourse and justifies by means of close investigation the methods utilized by Al-Jazeera TV interpreter. Generalization is one of the strategies that are used, others are approximation, substitution, incomplete sentences and summarizing. On the one hand, the study offers a glimpse as to what difficulties the translators will likely encounter when interpreting speeches of political figures with opposing views by identifying the intricate relationship between the translators' own ideological history, the institution that they are working for, and the political context of the speech. The research problem emerges from the challenges the interpreter face when trying to achieve neutrality in simultaneous interpreting giving the fact that ideological factors embody the interpretation task as well as the resulting political text.