Grammatical transformations in translation of political speeches

a case study

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the problem of translation of political speeches, which is extremely relevant today, as political activity plays a special role in society, affects the country’s place in the international arena and its relations with other coun-tries. Politicians have the opportunity to appeal to both the international community and their compatriots, gain recognition, demonstrate their leadership and represent their country in the best possible way via speeches. Translation of political speeches is considered to be one of the most complicated types of translation, which is the area of increased linguistic responsibility. Translation transformations, which are defined as certain structural or semantic changes that are the result of lexical and grammatical differences in languages, are used to achieve translation equivalence (translation adequacy) despite the differences in the formal and semantic systems of two languages. The research is aimed at examining the peculiarities of political speeches and difficulties arising in the process of their rendering into Ukrainian. This paper consists of six main sections. The first is an introduction to the study. The second examines the definition and features of political speeches given by national and foreign scientists. The third section explains the methodology used in the study and the data selection process. In the course of analysis, the existing scientific literature concerning the topic at hand providing valid grounds for the practical part of the work has been analyzed and grammatical translation transformation examples have been selected and examined. The research data was taken from the website of the US Embassy in Ukraine. Thereafter the focus shifts to challenges the students face in translation of political speeches and highlights the grammatical transformations classification that constituted the theoretical basis of the research. The fifth section is devoted to analyzing the data and the last section summarizes the findings of the study.