Since the beginning of his political rise, Trump’s remarks have been translated into a slew of languages worldwide, and his official swearing-in only elevates the power of his words. For some, his simple vocabulary and grammatical structure make his speeches easy to follow. But for others, his confusing logic, his tendency to jump quickly from topic to topic and his lack of attributions for so-called facts make his remarks sound like a puzzling jumble, and that creates a headache when translating Trump’s speeches for non-English audiences.
Bérengère Viennot, a professional French translator, said in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books that Trump’s broken syntax, often limited vocabulary and repetition of phrases make it difficult to create texts that read coherently in French, a very structured and logical language.
“Most of the time, when he speaks he seems not to know quite where he’s going,” Viennot said. “It’s as if he had thematic clouds in his head that he would pick from with no need of a logical thread to link them.”
She is left with a dilemma: either translate Trump exactly as he speaks — and let French readers struggle with the content — or keep the content, but smooth out the style, “so that it is a little bit more intelligible, leading non-English speakers to believe that Trump is an ordinary politician who speaks properly.”
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