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Abstract The title to the thesis at hand is ”Euphemism in Translation: A Socio-cognitive Critical Analysis of the US War on Terror Discourse and its Translation in Arabic Media”. Hence, euphemism, whether in the source discourse chunks or their translations, is the main linguistic feature that is traced, through the Socio-cognitive framework, under the umbrella of Critical Discourse Analysis. The objectives of the study are as follows: Analyzing the War on Terror discourse of two US administrations; namely those of George Bush and Barack Obama in order to expose their ideologies, investigating the conceptual frames exploited by US administrations for establishing certain notions as facts, in light of Lakoff’s notion of Framing, surveying how euphemistic expressions are used as a means of both Framing and introducing a positive self-presentation (PSP) and a negative other-presentation (NOP), highlighting the different linguistic tools used by speakers in the source texts to help create certain conceptual frames, examining how the frames created in the source language are internalized by receivers in the Arabic language after translation, and finally, scrutinizing the Arabic translations of euphemistic expressions coined by English language speakers in the relevant translated Arabic articles. The data under study comprises 13 discourse chunks pertaining to the Obama administration and 5 pertaining to Bush, in addition to numerous Arabic articles from which the euphemistic lexical items under scrutiny are extracted. The tools utilized in the analysis include The Socio-cognitive Framework, Framing, Euphemism, (Other) lexical choices, Evidentiality and examples, Victimization, Intimidation, PSP and NOP. The most important results for the study are as follows: first, Both of the surveyed US administrations exhibit what could be referred to as the ideology of bias, whereas dominance is the implicit target, while earning a position as a moral world leader is the explicit target. Second, frames play a central role in the policies of the US administrations. They could be considered the foundation upon which all other linguistic policy elements are laid. Third, there are four main frames that US policy-makers rely on. The macro structure of the four frames is more or less preserved as far as the two administrations in question are concerned, but there are changes within the micro structures of each one of them, mainly regarding the extent of reliance on each of the frames, according to the surrounding context at the said time. Fourth, The building blocks of such frames are numerous. The study focuses on tools such as euphemistic expressions, evidentiality and examples, lexical choices, victimization and intimidation. Within each and every one of the said tools, the discursive strategy of PSP (US) and NOP (Arabs/Muslims/enemies) is clearly indicated. The study, however, tends to shed a particular light on the tool of euphemism, since it is almost omnipresent in all the discourse of the US administrations. Fifth, two approaches are involved regarding the translation of euphemisms. First, there is the neutral approach that is manifested in transferring the whole conceptual frame, from the source language to the target language without any intervention on part of the translator. As for the second approach, it involves modifying the euphemism through a process of translational intervention and hence modifying the entire conceptual frame in the target language through “interpretive frames”. Keywords: ”Critical Discourse Analysis”, ”Socio-cognitive Framework”, ”Framing”, ”Euphemism” ”Translation Studies”, ”George Bush”, ”Barack Obama”, ”War on Terror” |