Analysis Of The English Translation Of Premier Wen Jiabao's Speeches From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As a special genre, political speeches have aroused great interest and controversy in the process of translation. The previous studies on the translation of political speeches mainly focus on the lexical level, while syntactical level and discourse level are seldom touched upon, which leads to some limitations. This thesis takes pragmatic translation as the starting point, trying to use Verschueren's adaptation theory to analyze the translation of political speeches at the lexical, syntactic and discourse level, and aims to provide some enlightenment for the translation of political documents.This thesis is composed of seven chapters. The first chapter briefly reviews the development of translation, the different understandings of pragmatics in the Anglo-American tradition and the European tradition, and the advancement of the pragmatics-oriented translation. In the second chapter, the author introduces the theory of adaptation, including the origin, three properties of languages, four angles of investigation, and translation in the framework of adaptation. In the third chapter, the classification of public speaking and the characteristics of political speeches are clarified. In the fourth to sixth chapters, the author concentrates on analyzing the application of adaptation theory in translating Chinese political speeches at the lexical, syntactic and discourse levels, and brings forth some techniques in translation. The last chapter points out the expressive power of the adaptation theory and the limitations of this thesis, for example, the limitation of corpus and investigation angle.