Cultural Presupposition And Its Application In Political Speech Translation

The concept of presupposition was first put forward by a German philosopher G. Frege. Later it came into linguistics and became the research object of logic, semantics and pragmatics successively, and many achievements were made in these fields. Presupposition is regarded as a kind of relation between two semantic propositions. Presupposition is something cancelable and context independent to some extent, so more and more linguists thought that presupposition was a pragmatic phenomenon rather than a semantic phenomenon. As a result, there are obvious limitations if we study presupposition only from the perspective of semantics. Presupposition is not only the relationship between propositions, but in more cases, it is also a kind of relationship between one proposition and the speaker; it is connected with the context, speakers and many other factors. From then on, the study of presupposition paid more attention to pragmatics, which was a great progress in presupposition study.However, after looking up a large amount of data, the author found that there was not much study of presupposition in the translation field, and the importance of presupposition has not attracted enough attention of translators. This thesis makes an analysis of cultural presupposition in American presidential inaugurals, especially the inaugural speeches of President F. Kennedy and President Barrack Obama, to make a thorough and general analysis of presupposition trigger used in translation practice, especially an emphasizing analysis from the perspective of cultural presupposition. American presidential inaugurals play an important role in American history, politics and literature of the world, even in world history and they have long been the research object of historians, politicians and linguists. Therefore, understanding and analyzing the cultural presupposition and their functions in American presidential inaugurals can help us comprehend the American presidential inaugurals more thoroughly.The thesis is composed of five chapters. The introduction part reviews the research history of presupposition, the characteristics of American presidential inaugural speech; analyzes the translation script of the inaugural speech of President Kennedy and President Obama through presupposition theory; and lists what accomplishments have been achieved in semantics and pragmatics fields as well as the purpose, significance and structure of the thesis. The second chapter focuses on the definition, classification, function of presupposition and its research methodology, taking cultural presupposition as a main research object, including classification, features and functions of cultural presupposition. The third chapter illustrates the translators'awareness of cultural presupposition; the study finds out that cultural presupposition plays a very important role in simplifying language, changing topic, projecting information, making texts or discourses more coherent and cohesive and illustrates the importance and necessity to apply strategies of cultural presupposition in translation processing. The last part points out the shortcomings of the thesis and its direction for further research.