A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Obama's Political Speeches

Barack Obama,the former President of America,possesses tactful speaking techniques in his political speeches,which has attracted intense academic interests in the field of translation studies in China.Existing studies on the translations of Obama's political speeches mainly involve comparisons between the source and the target texts,and comparisons among different Chinese versions.Most of the studies are conducted from the linguistic perspectives,such as semantics,systemic-functional grammar,cognitive linguistics and etymology.And some relevant studies are conducted from the cultural perspectives,such as adaptation theory and rewriting theory.Others are from the hermeneutic motion in philosophical approach and the skopos theory in functional approach.All those studies have made fruitful achievements in the comparative research of Obama's speeches and their translations.However,how to approach the topic from a more holistic perspective which combines the dimensions of language,culture and communication remains to be a less charted area.Under such academic circumstances,the present study,on the theoretical basis of Hu Gengshen's theory of three-dimensional transformation in eco-translatology,aims to make a comparative study of the two versions of Obama's four political speeches translated by Xin Xianyun and Wang Ruize respectively.With its focus on selective adaptation and adaptive selection transformation on the dimensions of language,culture and communication to achieve a dynamic balance,Hu's theory fits into the current ecological trend in the interdisciplinary studies.Under the theoretical framework of three-dimensional transformation,the study intends to locate the differences between the two versions on the three dimensions of language,culture and communication,using Gideon Toury's three-phase methodology for descriptive translation studies(DTS).The specific findings are indicated as follows.Firstly,on the linguistic dimension,exemplified with the lexical,syntactic and textual level,Xin's version is closer to the source language,while Wang's version is closer to the target language.Secondly,on the cultural dimension exemplified with the aspects of economic culture,political culture and social customs,Xin's version is more American culture-oriented while Wang's version is more Chinese culture-oriented.Thirdly,on the communicative dimension,whether for the overt or the covert communicative intentions,the literal meanings are mainly conveyed in Xin's version which results in that his transformation of communicative intentions tends to be more indirect and implicit.On the contrary,the real communicative intentions are revealed more directly and explicitly in Wang's version though the transformation of literal meanings is not completely equal.Hopefully,the significance of this study might encompass two aspects.Firstly,it may enrich the translation studies of speeches,especially in the aspect of the comparison of different translation versions of speech texts.Secondly,it may shed light on an understanding of translation practice for translators by combining the dimensions of language,culture and communication.