Peculiarities of Translation of Linguistic and Stylistic Means in French Political Discourse

Abstract

The aim of this article is to study the specifics of translating the political speeches of the current French President Emmanuel Macron, namely, to identify the range of translation techniques in conveying typical lexical and stylistic means of expression. The material for the study was E. Macron's political speeches (and their translation into Russian) delivered by him during his official visit to Russia (St. Petersburg, 24-25 May 2018, Konstantinovsky Palace). E. Macron led the French delegation at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, where the French side was invited as a guest of honour. This study is at the intersection of political linguistics, discourse analysis and translation studies; the methods of contextual-interpretation, pragmatic, quantitative and translation analysis were applied. In the result it was revealed that at the lexical level, Macron's political discourse is characterised by an abundance of synonymous series, antonymous constructions and evaluative words. The most frequent lexico-grammatical transformations in translation were: modulation, semantic development, substitutions, additions, antonymic translation, with the main strategy aimed at preserving the structural and semantic, pragmatical peculiarities of the original.