LINGUOSTYLISTIC AND PRAGMATIC FEATURES OF TRANSLATING D. TRUMP’S AND J. BIDEN’S SPEECHES INTO UKRAINIAN (BASED ON ADDRESSES FROM 2019–2025)

Abstract

This article focuses on the linguistic and stylistic features of translating speeches by US Presidents D. Trump and J. Biden into Ukrainian. The primary aim is to identify the specifics of adapting American political speeches into Ukrainian and, based on this analysis, draw conclusions about the essence of political translation and the key aspects that must be considered when translating political texts into another language. The study successfully identifies the key features of political discourse, including its close connection with language, expressiveness, ideology, theatricality, and competitiveness. Within political discourse, speakers employ various lexical and stylistic means to achieve their communicative goals. The research examines the lexical, syntactic, stylistic, and pragmatic features of political discourse. Lexical features include a high concentration of political, economic, and legal terminology, as well as frequent use of idiomatic expressions. Syntactic features involve the frequent use of passive constructions, rhetorical questions, and conditional and affirmative sentences, which serve to focus the audience’s attention on the speaker’s message. Stylistic features include the frequent employment of metaphors, metonymy, epithets, hyperbole, repetition, enumeration, and inversion. The study also demonstrates that political speeches possess significant pragmatic potential, containing multiple techniques and means for the effective presentation of politicians’ thoughts and ideas. The analysis shows that the dominant transformations include contextual replacement, lexical addition, substitution, transformation of grammatical sentence structure, specification, and generalization. These findings are justified primarily by the specificity of political discourse and the fundamental differences between the source and target languages.