Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech: Translation and Commentary

Abstract

Although Winston Churchill wrote some of the greatest speeches of the twentieth century, few of those speeches or only fragments of them have been translated into Arabic. This thesis is a translation and commentary of one of the most famous speeches of Winston Churchill, the Iron Curtain oration, given at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in the United States of America in 1946. The Iron Curtain is particularly chosen for translation because of its political, historical, and literary dimensions. Translating this speech provides a basis for the focus of this thesis: to discuss problems of translating political speeches, especially those which are rich in rhetoric, in light of theory; to offer solutions for these problems; and to inspect strategies as well as techniques that lead to these solutions. To this end, the emphasis of the commentary will be on how three rhetorical devices, namely metaphor, allusion and cohesive devices, are handled in the translation. It is concluded that despite the diversity of translation strategies opted for in the translation, there are no set formulas for translating political speeches; it is just a matter of recognizing the individuality of the speaker's intentions by analyzing his use of style and rhetoric, being familiar with the common rhetorical devices used in the respective languages, and understanding political, historical as well as cultural situations in context.