Making Meaning in Spanish from Trump’s Meaningless Discourse Shortcomings in Translating the Dark Side of Political Persuasion

Résumé

Donald Trump’s speeches have often been criticised for lacking substance, coherence, and meaningful content, with critics highlighting his use of rhetorical strategies prioritising emotion, spectacle, and polarisation over reasoned debate and thoughtful policymaking. This study addresses the challenge of translating Trump’s heterodox political rhetoric into Spanish, while also examining the limitations of neural and AI-based translation in capturing the nuances and complexities of political persuasion. Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021, delivered before the march on the Capitol, is particularly significant due to its potential role in inciting the subsequent events. In it, he repeated false claims of election fraud and urged his supporters to “fight” in an attempt to overturn the election results. Our study aims to identify the unique traits in hisdiscourse, particularly elements of meaningless rhetoric, and how these present challenges for translation. Making sense of his disjointed syntax and abrupt topic shifts is already difficult in English, and these traits add complexity when translating into other languages. We pursue to demonstrate that, despite significant advancements in neural and AI translation systems, they still struggle to capture language nuances, especially in the context of rhetorical quirks and dysphemism used by Trump. His deployment of colloquialisms, tags, hyperbole, and other linguistic oddities, deeply embedded in American culture and political context, are challenging to convey accurately in Spanish without losing their original meaning, subtlety, or impact. Our work seems to find a compromise, enhancing the comprehensibility of the translated version while retaining some of the original’s flavour.