Abstract

In linguistics, Systemic Functional Linguistic School represented by Halliday has been having a great impact in the field of discourse analysis in the past 30 years and has become one of the important discourse analysis schools. As a significant part, transitivity reflects the ideational function in the systemic functional grammar and boasts a wide application in discourse analysis, such as in speeches. This paper has selected Trump’s inaugural speech and its Chinese version as a case study for sample and quantitative analysis of underlying textual features of political speeches from the perspective of Halliday’s transitivity, attempting to help readers get a better understanding of transitivity theory and features of political speeches, as well as consequently master the method of applying transitivity to political speeches. Furthermore, by way of a contrastive analysis of transitivity between Trump’s inaugural speech and its Chinese translation, it tries to delve into the translation strategies of political speeches, to guide practice translation of political speeches, to prove the applicability of transitivity in translation studies and to offer a creative angle for further researches.

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