The Translation of Parallelism in Arabic Political Speeches between Loss and Compensation: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Political discourse is characterized by stylistic and rhetorical features that distinguish it from other text genres. When a rhetorical feature such as parallelism is used frequently in Arabic political speeches, it becomes significant to highlight the fact that this recurrence of structure is deliberate. According to Islam and Cahyani (2020: 273): (T)he deliberate use of a word or phrase more than once in a sentence or a text to create a sense of pattern or form or to emphasize certain elements in the mind of the reader or listener (…) can be utilized (as) a major rhetorical strategy for producing emphasis, clarity, amplification, or emotional effect. The objective of this study is to highlight the loss and the compensation of parallelism when translated from Arabic into English in political speeches at bottom-up level: word, sentence and chunk levels. This study shows that parallelism is used very frequently in Arabic political speeches and it is very popular among Arab political speakers as a rhetorical device to achieve persuasion, assertion and emotional effect on its audience. .