A Contrastive Analysis Of English And Chinese Political Speeches And Translation-from The Perspective Of Metafunctions

Systemic functional grammar proposed by Halliday has been widely used in discourse analysis, but its applicability in translation studies has drawn more and more attention from scholars home and abroad. This thesis makes a contrastive analysis of the original political speeches and their translated versions from the perspective of metafunctions in a systematic way. In the analysis, the author draws much on some Chinese scholars' research results on Chinese language based on the theory of metafunctions. It is hoped that the analysis can provide some implications for translation and further prove the applicability and effectiveness of functional grammar in contrastive analysis and translation.There are twenty pairs of political speeches in the corpus of this research. Ten of them are Chinese political speeches and their translated English versions, which are downloaded from the website: www.fmprc.gov.cn. Another 10 pairs of samples are English Political speeches and their translated Chinese versions. Most of them are downloaded from these two websites: www.un.org and usinfo.state.gov. Two pairs are drawn from the two books respectively: English Essays 50, edited by Tao Jie; Public Speaking, written by Li Yuanshou.The thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction. It gives a general description of theories concerned, including research aims and methodology. Chapter 2 is about the theoretical framework that comprises the transitivity system in ideational metafunction, the mood system in interpersonal metafunction and the thematic structure in textual metafunction. Chapter 3 makes a contrastive analysis of the originals and translations and identifies their similarities and differences in terms of transitivity processes, Mood types, modality and thematic structures. And possible explanations for the differences are also provided. Based on discussions in Chapter 3, Chapter four presents some strategies and techniques in the translation of political speeches, which are helpful in translation practice.