| Since being proposed by J. R. Martin in the 1990s, Appraisal Theory has attracted much attention from linguists home and abroad. It is an advance in the study of interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which contains three sub-domains, namely attitude, engagement and graduation. Based on the concrete analyses of lexis, Appraisal Theory reveals how interpersonal function of a text/speech is realized through evaluative resources.Huangren Shouji, one of the masterpieces of Chu T’ienwen, who is an eminent modern Taiwanese novelist, adopts a special perspective on homosexuality and wins the First China Times Novel Prize. Its English version Notes of a Desolate Man, translated by the prominent translator and sinologist Howard Goldblatt and his wife Sylvia Li-chun Lin, is also a great success. Nevertheless, in terms of homosexuality, the original novel and its English translation provoke different responses among their respective readers as well as literary reviewers. Readers of the original Chinese novel think Chu T’ienwen’s writing has attracted many homosexuals’ attention and has already been accepted by the mainstream literary circle in Taiwan, while readers of the English translation think that Chu T’ienwen is not competent to describe the life of a gay as a woman and is kind of homophobic. Taking the above different responses as the point of departure, the present research carries out a comparative study of Chu T’ienwen’s attitude towards homosexuality with that of Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin from three aspects, that is, homosexual identity, homosexuals’ living environment and their relationship with other people as well as the hetero society. The major findings of the study are as follows:First, quantitatively, Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin use a bit more evaluation resources than Chu T’ienwen, but the proportions occupied by each domains of Appraisal Theory in the source text and the target text are quite alike. It means that Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin are substantially loyal to Chu’s attitude. On the other hand, the two translators are under constraints of the linguistic features of English, a hypotactic language. They need to use more cohesive devices, including conjunctions like but to connect sentences, yielding more engagement resources.Secondly, qualitatively, on one hand, Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin share Chu T’ienwen’s attitude in most cases; on the other hand, they tend to display their own attitude more directly and differ from Chu T’ienwen in homosexual love compared with heterosexual love, homosexual identity and homosexual right movement, for they advocate heterosexual love, and do not connect American famous stars’ queer behavior with homosexuals. They have their own ideology and values in alignment with the mainstream hetero social system they belong to, which may influence target text readers’interpretation of Chu T’ienwen’s view on homosexuality.To sum up, the thesis analyzes the difference of attitudes towards homosexual discourse in Huangren Shouji and Notes of a Desolate Man both quantitatively and qualitatively under the inspiration of Appraisal Theory in SFL, and explores the possible reasons and influence behind the difference. It is hoped that the present study can contribute to the researches on translation of attitude concerning homosexuality, and bring inspirations to future studies. |
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