It seems that the speeches, but mostly the elliptical answers and sudden shifts on various topics of Trump, give it a hardship for translators worldwide. Japan Times specifically states that, for the Japanese translators, Donald Trump is a nightmare.
Chikako Tsuruta, professor at the University of Tokyo and interpreter for news with Trump on CNN, ABC and CBS, said that “He is so overconfident and yet so logically unconvincing that my interpreter friends and I often joke that if we translated his words as they are, we would end up making ourselves sound stupid… He rarely speaks logically, and he only emphasizes one side of things as if it were the absolute truth… There are lots of moments when I suspected his assertions were factually dubious.” (Newsweek)
To adapt Trump’s speeches to Japanese culture, another Japanese translator, Agness Kaku says that Trump’s propositions have often to be condensed to highlight the idea presented. For example, when Trump said the BBC “[S]he probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say, you tell me, but plenty of people have written that.” Japanese TV station translated HK by “She likely wasn’t allowed to give a statement.” and CNN Japan through “It could be she wasn’t allowed to speak.”
Another translator, Chinese, say how was changed the sentence of Trump, “I moved on her like a bitch, and I could not get there, and she was married,” in the Chinese media in “Wǒ Xiang duìdài dàngfù Yiyang kàojìn tā “(“I treated her like a slut to get close to her.”)
A study by Carnegie Mellon University concluded that Donald Trump has the poorest “lexical richness” of all US presidents.
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