Interpersonal Function in Paul Biya’s 2018 French Inaugural Speech and its English Translation

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, with regard to mood choices in the French and English texts respectively, declaratives account for 96.42% and 97.79%, imperatives account for 3.58% and 2.21% while there is no representation of the interrogative in both texts. Therefore the mood system in a vast majority of the clauses in the French Source Text is preserved in the English Target Text. 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.