Interpersonal Function in Paul Biya’s 2018 French Inaugural Speech and its English Translation
Keywords:
Systemic Functional Grammar, Interpersonal Metafunction, Mood System, Translation, Inaugural Speeches, Paul Biya, Cameroon.Abstract
In this paper, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar theory (1985) is used to analyze the interpersonal metafunction of language, with focus on the mood system, across two linguistics mediums. The corpus analyzed is a political speech namely, Cameroonian president Paul Biya’s 2018 inaugural speech in French and its English translation. Specifically, the paper seeks to know if the mood system of the political speech in the French language is preserved in its English translation. The paper leads to the conclusion that the mood system in about 94% of the clauses in the French text is preserved in the English and almost 6% of the mood system in French does not have correspondences in English. This is proof that in the English Translation of Paul Biya’s 2018 inaugural speech, the translator tried as much as possible to keep the original style of the political speech.
