A Genre Approach to the Translation of Political Speeches Based on a Chinese-Italian-English Trilingual Parallel Corpus

Abstract

Using a trilingual parallel corpus, this article investigates the translation of Chinese political speeches in Italian and English, with the aim to explore cross-linguistic variations regarding translation shifts of key functional elements in the genre of political speeches. The genre-based methodology includes a rhetorical move analysis, which is used to highlight key functional elements of the genre, and a functional grammar analysis of translation shifts of the lexico-grammatical elements identified in the previous stage. The findings show that the core communicative function of the genre is “Proposing deontic statements,” and modality of obligation is essential for the realization of this rhetorical function. Afterwards, the analysis of translation shifts of deontic modality reveals that the English translation is characterized by higher modality value shifts in comparison to the Italian translation. This difference may be related to the degree of autonomy in translation choice and understanding of the communicative purposes of the translation genre. In terms of methodological implications, this functionalist approach attempts to providing insights into the communicative purposes of the translation genre by focusing on how key functional elements are translated.