A Study On E-C Translation Of English Political Speech From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

Political speech often plays an important role. Their deliverers are mostly the representatives of the government or the political parties, and their purposes are to transmit and express the speaker’s stance and points of view, to motivate the passion or enthusiasm of the audience and to gain support to make contributions together to the government or their political parties. It is no exaggeration to claim that political speech can be regarded as an invisible and powerful weapon in winning support from the audience. The current American president Barack Obama owes his success to his political speech. With the growing communication between the East and the West, the frequent exchanges among the countries in terms of politics, economy and culture, the importance of Western political speech is self-evident. So they have been frequently translated into Chinese. However, not all translators can realize that compared with other literary works, political speeches are more social, interactive and practical.In terms of Skopostheorie, all translations apply various translation strategies and methods due to their different motivations in order to achieve the appropriate communicative effect. Skopos theory makes the translators combine knowledge with experience, which delivers the information of the source text.Based on Skopostheorie, this research takes Barack Obama’s victory speech and Inauguration Speech as data. It aims to find out whether translation of English political speech is in accordance with the three rules of Skopostheorie, that is, the skopos rule, the coherence rule and the fidelity rule. The author hopes that through this study we can have an inspiration towards the translation strategies in translating political speech. With skopos theory as the starting point, the translator can make more coherent and fluent texts in conformity with the speaker’s purpose and intention.