In this paper an innovative joint source channel coding scheme is presented. The system is based on iterative soft decoding of arithmetic codes, by means of a novel soft-in soft-out decoder based on suboptimal search and pruning of a binary tree. An error resilient arithmetic coder with a forbidden symbol is used in order to improve the performance of the joint source/channel scheme. The performance in the case of transmission across the AWGN channel is evaluated in terms of frame error rate, and compared to a traditional separated approach. Finally the convergence property of the system is analyzed by means of the EXIT chart technique.