A Comparative Study Of Two English Versions Of Du Fu’s Poems From The Perspective Of Attitude In Appraisal Theory

As a recent development within the paradigm of Systemic Functional Linguistics,Appraisal Theory examines interpersonal meanings from a lexis-grammatical perspective.Scholars have adopted this theory to conduct translation studies since it can help identify the attitude in source texts and assess its reproduction in the target texts.Up till now,the theory has been applied to media translation,business translation,and literary translation,etc.But few studies focus on studying poetry translation from appraisal perspective.Using attitude system within appraisal theory as a tool,this thesis conducts a research on the attitudes of two English versions of Du Fu’s poems translated by Stephen Owen and Xu Yuanchong respectively.The aims of this thesis is to find their features in terms of the attitude reproduction and the reasons causing these features.This thesis can test the applicability of appraisal theory and bring about implications for translation practice.Classical Chinese poetry is a treasure in world literature.As China is going global,the translation of classical Chinese poetry plays a vital role in spreading Chinese culture.Du Fu is an important figure in the history of’ Chinese poetiry.He left around 1400 poems,touching upon a variety of themes.Emotions,opinions and values are contained in his dense and profound language,leaving rich appraisal resources to be examined.Many translators have translated Du Fu’s work into English.Among them,Stephen Owen and Xu Yuanchong are very representative.Therefore,this thesis chooses 33 poems of Du Fu translated by Owen and Xu respectively as the research data.After a statistical analysis and a case study,it is found that Xu makes more amplifications,omissions and adaptations than Owen.On many occasions,Xu makes these changes to meet the rhyme.Moreover,Xu tends to change the implicit attitudes into the explicit ones to make it easier for the readers to understand.And Xu is more creative than Owen.On the other hand,Owen is more faithful to the original.But the biggest problem for him is the misunderstanding of the original,which leads to many omissions and mistranslations.The reasons for these features are different translation strategies,different cultural backgrounds and different translation standards.Despite possible contributions,there are still shortcomings in the thesis.For future researches,more translated poems of the two translators can be examined and an inter-rater approach can be taken to increase the validity and reliability of the study.