A Study on the Translation of Political Speeches From the Perspective of SFL’s Concept of Context

Political speeches, to which much attention is paid, are an important type of public speeches. Since countries increasingly strengthen economic, political, and cultural exchange, the significance of political speech translation among countries in policy decisions becomes increasingly prominent. Systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) established by Halliday has shown great applicability to a variety of fields of studies. Especially, it has been applied to translation studies in recent years, which attracts much attention of domestic and overseas scholars. In the study of political speech translation, it has a high fit degree with SFL’s concept of context. Although, there is a great amount of research on SFL, little importance is attached to the studies on the integration of SFL and political speech translation. Based on the SFL’s concept of context, the thesis studies political speech translation from three factors, including field of discourse, mode of discourse, and tenor of discourse. SFL’s contextual model is able to offer an effective tool in the comparison and evaluation.