The Translation Of Modal Auxiliaries In English And Chinese Political Speeches―from The Perspective Of Interpersonal Meaning

Modal auxiliaries indicate various types of modality and their use is verycharacteristic of both English and Chinese. In political speeches, a rich variety of modalexpressions is commonly found, as it is a kind of genre that is full of speakers’ attitudes,opinions and judgments. Public speakers make a point of communicating and interactingwith their audiences to realize the interpersonal relationship, in the hope to gain theirsupport. In spite of the great mass of studies on modal auxiliaries, few scholars ever reallydid an analytic study of the translation of modal auxiliaries from the perspective ofinterpersonal meaning in English and Chinese political speeches. Therefore, this thesis isaimed to present a preliminary contrastive analysis of translation in this particular field.For this study, a self-established corpus of political speeches is designed.20pieces ofEnglish and Chinese political speeches and their translation versions are collected fromreputable sources. Then the author carried out a quantitative and qualitative research on therealization of interpersonal meaning of modal auxiliaries from the perspectives of modalitytypes and values, with reference to the framework of Halliday’s theory of interpersonalfunction.From the perspective of modality types, which is based on such semantic categories aspossibility, necessity&obligation and volition, it is found that modal auxiliariesexpressing possibility is most used in English while those expressing necessity&obligation occur most frequently in Chinese. The percentage of English modal auxiliariesexpressing possibility is higher than that of its Chinese counterpart, as English modalauxiliaries for expressing possibility are often translated into Chinese by lexical words. Incontrast, occurrences of Chinese modal auxiliaries expressing necessity&obligationappear more frequently than those in English. And it is supposed that the reason lies in thefact that Chinese modal auxiliaries expressing necessity&obligation can be translated intoEnglish using main verbs or imperative sentences. Besides, modal auxiliaries expressingvolition are also used by speakers to express a strong desire to complete certain tasks or a similar call for listeners to complete something.From the perspective of modality values, modal auxiliaries with medium valuesattached occupy the most proportion in the three scales. Modal auxiliaries of high valuerank second in Chinese while those of low value come in the second place in English. Thisdiscrepancy displays the differences between English and Chinese political speeches. It isalso found that modality values between the original and translated speeches correspond toa high degree; however, when translating, there are still some shifts of modality values.Hopefully the findings of this thesis can shed some light on the translation of modalauxiliaries when striving to fulfill the interpersonal function successfully. It may furtherhelp better understand modality and pave a way for more systematic and profounderstudies of translating modality in Chinese and English political speeches.