What America is Supposed to Be About: Translating Bernie Sanders’s Announcement Speech
Summary
This research analyses various aspects of Bernie Sanders’s announcement speech from May 26th in 2015 to see which hurdles need to be overcome in order to make an adequate translation of the speech for a Dutch audience. First, an appropriate target audience is selected and analysed so as to be able to choose a possible publication that is in line with this audience. Next, the rhetorical context of Sanders’s speech is inspected more closely. More specifically, the context of American politics is analysed and Sanders’s rhetorical strategy is dissected so as to make sure this strategy is not lost when making a Dutch translation. The third step is to take a closer look at the translation problems as identified by Nord that arise during the process of making this translation. These are marked in the target text through the use of footnotes, as well as discussed more elaborately in the theoretical part of the research. As it turns out, the nature of these problems was predominantly pragmatic or culture-specific; there were much fewer language-pair-specific or text-specific translation problems. Also, the former two categories proved to contain the majority of the translation problems that were most difficult to overcome.