An SFL Approach To Translation Of English Political Speeches

Political speeches are one particular type of public speeches, which are often addressed by government officials to talk about or comment on all kinds of big and hot issues at home and abroad. Their main purpose is to advocate the speaker's political proposals and stances, to motivate the audience and to win the support of audience. Campaign speeches, inauguration speeches, conference speeches, government work report, diplomatic speeches are all categorized into the genre of political speeches. Western political public speeches, especially the ones that are addressed by president candidates during their campaign, are particularly noteworthy. The 44th American president Barack Obama is a legend in the history of American political presidential campaign, whose success is said to be largely attributed to his marvelous speeches. As political, economical and cultural communications among countries all over the world are growing increasingly intense, the importance of the translation of English political speeches has been more and more standing out.Systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) founded by Halliday had shown great applicability to various fields of studies since day one. Recently, a growing number of scholars at home and abroad have heeded its application to translation studies. According to Halliday, language has three main meta-functions, which are the ideational function, interpersonal function, and textual function. The analysis of meta-functions of language can facilitate the translator's understanding of the implied deep meaning of discourses and the writer's intended meaning and writing style.Based on full understanding of the original text, a translator could choose appropriate target language form according to actual needs to reproduce the meta-functions of the source text and to achieve the maximum equivalence of the three functional meanings between source text and target text. In the light of this, the present study attempts to employ the Halliday's meta-function theory to analyze English political speeches and their Chinese translations, and summarizes some principles and techniques of translating English political discourse, hoping to contribute to the research of translation of political speeches both theoretically and practically.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one introduces the research background, the significance of the study, the research methodology, the research objectives, and the organization of the thesis.Chapter two is literature review, which outlines the previous studies on the translation of political speeches and some of their common weakness, and the studies on SFL's application to translation made at home and abroad are outlined as well.Chapter three mainly introduces the theoretical basis of the present study. It depicts the development and overview of SFL, explaining in detail the three meta-functions in SFL. The discussion of the ideational function mainly involves transitivity system; the interpersonal function mainly involves mood, modality and appraisal system; the textual function mainly focuses on thematic structure and thematic progression. All these theories lay a solid foundation for later analysis of texts.Chapter four mainly discusses the definition, language features and structural patterns of English political speeches (EPS), and then gives a brief introduction to Obama and discusses the general characteristics of Obama's speeches as well. What is discussed in Chapter four also facilitates the following analyses of texts.Chapter five, the core part of the thesis, revolves around the research question of how to realize the equivalence of three meta-functions in political speech translation. It makes an analysis of three typical speeches of Obama's, i.e. inaugural address, victory speech and keynote speech, and examines its Chinese translations under the framework of SFL. It is found that the top three process types that are employed in political speeches are material process, relational process and mental process. In order to realize the equivalence on the ideational level, the translator should decide whether to perverse the functional components or not and how to preserve them on the basis of full analysis of the transitivity system of the source text. Declarative sentences are used the most in English political speeches, and many first person singular and plural pronouns and many words with evaluative meanings are found. In discussing how to reproduce the interpersonal function of EPS, the present study, closely combined with text analyses, mainly explores the translation of mood types, modal words, and evaluative words. In exploring the issue of the reproduction of textual function of EPS in translation, the thesis examines how the theme-rheme theory on both clausal and textual level could help translator to get a better understanding of the gist of the text and the development cues of the passage. With the deep understanding of the text, the translator could ensure himself to choose the right target language to reproduce the maximal equivalence of the textual function, under the premise of complying with the habitual use and language features of target language. Chapter six concludes the main findings, exhibits the limitations of the present study and makes suggestions for further research.