Risks in Arabic News Translation of Trump’s Offensive Expressions against Presidents

News translation faces several obstacles like the fast pace of information dissemination, transforming the world into a small global village. Thus, several pressuring factors are imposed in the competitive news working environment. Along the way, many risks are associated with the translation act of multiple languages news agencies. For example, the translation of the offensive language from English into Arabic formulates various risks to be conveyed faithfully to the source text, and culturally appropriate to the target reader- Arab speaking countries. The purpose of this study focuses on investigating and analyzing the types of risks that take place in the translation of the offensive language in news. Under the framework of the Risk Management Model introduced by Pym (2015) and integrating translation techniques proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet (1995), six news agencies are selected to analyze a number of offensive quotes uttered by the American President Trump against other world presidents during his first election term from the year 2017 to 2021. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the data is analyzed to examine the frequency of the risk types as well as the translation strategies adopted by the news agencies to manage the risks. In addition, the study conducts close analysis of the contextual and lexical changes occurred in the target texts. The results reveal that communicative risk is considered the most frequent type of risks in this type of data. A combination of risk strategies is adopted by the agencies, based on the offensive level of the profanities. Consequently, contextual and lexical modifications are evidently observed in the Arabic editions of the news agencies which might serve the two parties- the agencies’ profiles and the Arab readers.