Chinese Translation Of President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

There are many worldwide famous speeches influencing people deeply and widely,such as Washington’s and Lincoln’s speeches.American Presidents’ inaugural speeches with their elegant words,delicate layout and vivid rhetoric attract people’s attention.Those main parts are worthy of people’s learning and adoption.Through searching for relevant data from library and how-net,the author finds that most scholars’ studies are mainly on strategies employed in the speeches from different perspectives.In order to improve the study on Chinese versions of American Presidents’ inaugural speeches,the author takes the functional equivalence theory as the theoretical guidance.Nida’s functional theory emphasizes on "content over form" on the basis of faithfulness and advocates the translation standard of "reader’s response",which is appropriate to this study.Taking two Chinese versions of Obama’s second inaugural speech as an example,this paper is intended to study whether these two versions meet the requirements of functional equivalence theory or not,that is,whether the original speech’s meaning is accepted by Chinese audience or not.In this paper,the author studies the stylistic features of American Presidents’ inaugural speeches from the aspects of words,sentences,and rhetoric and analyzes translation tactics used in the Chinese versions,and points out some classic situations about "wrong translation" and "missing translation" existing in these two versions.Accordingly,the author puts forward related tactics to improve Chinese translations,for example,when the technique of literal translation in receptor language is unable to be used to reproduce the original text,free translation will be applied instead;when the style of source language is unable to be embodied in receptor language,some other translation techniques will be used delicately to fit the receptor language’s style.This study has some enlightenment and references for Chinese translation.