Translations of English hedging devices in president Barack Obama’s first inaugural address into Vietnamese

Abstract

Politicians often use hedges to express their ideologies, their personal viewpoints or their attitudes about different issues or their listeners; however, these linguistic devices can also help them relieve the burden of their own responsibilities. The inauguration speeches of the new US president are considered a kind of political proclamation, which is an official opportunity to introduce the new US president to the world, so this is a very special kind of document to be studied. This paper was conducted to investigate the translation of English hedges in President Barack Obama's first inaugural address on January 20, 2009 into Vietnamese. The study also examined the effect of using hedges in political discourses of both languages - English and Vietnamese.