On The Application Of Appraisal Theory In The Translation Of Fairy Tales

With linguistic approaches introduced into translation filed, translation studies have witnessed a shift to linguistic trend. Many linguistic theories have become the supporting translation theories.The appraisal theory, which was first introduced by Martin in the early 1990s,is an extension of interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL).It consists of three main sub-systems: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement. Attitude system explains human beings'understanding of the world and their emotional reactions, which provides the materials and ideas for evaluation. Engagement system explains the sources of ideas and emotions. With the help of Graduation, the affect, judgment and appreciation can be assessed by different degrees of intensity. Graduation is mainly realized by different shades of words in certain evaluative categories. It can also be performed with intensifiers, softening focus words, amplifiers, evaluative structures and contextual evaluation. This theory has been applied in the analysis of many texts of different genres and types. This thesis attempts to apply the Appraisal theory in fairy tales translation, a rarely touched domain which was seldom discussed or studied by previous researchers. By comparing and analyzing two different translations of Andersen's complete fairy tales, this thesis aims at categorizing the words with appraisal meaning and working out their respective distributions and proportions in the two versions so as to explore the question as to how to translate them properly.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction of the Appraisal theory, the purpose of the present study, the methodology employed in the present study, and a brief account of the data chosen as well as the overall organization of the thesis. Chapter Two is dealing with literature review mainly from three aspects: one is concerning the applications of SFL in translation studies, and the second one is about Andersen and his fairy tales and their previous translation studies. And the third one is pertaining to some characteristics of fairy tales translation. Chapter Three and Four serve as the central parts of this study in which we shall present our theoretical basis——the Appraisal theory, and introduce its three sub-systems in details i. e. Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. In Chapter Four by adopting the quantitative and qualitative analytic methodology, we lay great emphasis on analyzing and discussing the appraisal resources in categories in the two translations of Andersen's complete fairy tales. Chapter Five is the summary of the whole thesis. It summarizes the major findings and limitations of the present study, and also provides some suggestions for further academic study in the future. It is the present author's sincere hope that this research could shed some new light on the translation studies of Andersen's fairy tales.