A Pragmatic Analysis of the Translation of Presuppositions: A Case Study of Four Political Speeches

Abstract

Politics plays a major role in people’s lives and political discourse is usually used to influence people’s thoughts and points of view. In their speeches, politicians tend to use all the possible tools to manipulate their audience. Such tools are sometimes borrowed from pragmatics. Presupposition is one of the pragmatic tools that is widely utilized by politicians to establish a shared ground between them and their audience. The study starts to shed light on the concept of pragmatic presupposition and highlight the issue of presupposition used in political speeches in relation to translation. Then the study discusses the translation of pragmatic presuppositions found in four speeches by two US presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.