On The Interpretation Of The Cultural Factors From Chinese To English In Public Speeches

The primary purpose of this thesis is to have an analysis of the cultural factors appearing in each part of a public speech and provide some coping strategies for handling these cultural factors from Chinese to English in the public speech interpretation setting and in practices. Public speech interpretation is different from other types of interpretation such as liaison interpretation, press conference interpretation, negotiation interpretation and so on because it has its unique structure which also makes it worth studying as a topic. The cultural factors are first categorized by the author into different groups according to the components of a speech, namely salutation, opening remarks and main contents. The main contents of public speech, which contain the positions of the government or the opinions of the speakers from a certain cultural background, embrace most of the cultural factors appearing in public speech. The author tries to analyze the cultural difference reflected in the main contents of political and ceremonial speeches from six aspects: political terms with Chinese characteristics, modifier, terms for publicity, four-character expressions and proverbs, terms understood differently by Chinese and Westerners and figures. Since the rendering of public speech is often a mixture of translation and interpretation, the author employs several interpretation methods as well as some translation methods to handle the cultural factors in the public speech interpretation setting and in practices.