Transediting Trump’s inaugural speech in Italian daily newspapers

The inaugural speech of the new President of The United States is one of those rare cases in news translation in which it is possible to identify a Source Text (ST) and compare it to several Target Texts (TTs). This paper focuses on what was reported in eight Italian national daily newspapers concerning the inaugural address of Donald Trump in 2017 on the day following his inaugural address. It provides an overview of the different choices and levels of translation visibility that were observed in the selected newspapers, observing full translations, paratexts and migrated segments embedded in articles describing the inaugural. Through a focus on the ST-TT comparison – employing Selective Appropriation (Valdeón, 2008) and Munday’s Evaluation paradigm (2012) – this investigation shows how the comparative analysis of translations can also be employed to enrich the textual analysis of the inaugural itself. Ideological translation choices are explored, focusing in particular on a case of omission in the right-wing Libero – which openly appreciated the election of Trump – and a case of addition in the communist Il Manifesto – which openly deplored Trump.