| At present,our country is in a stage of vigorous social development with a booming economy and a thriving culture.Especially in the current post-epidemic era,China’s international status has steadily improved and it has a more and more important voice in international affairs.Every year,Chinese President Xi Jinping attends many international congresses and based on different topics,his political speeches show our country’s attitude and standpoint towards global events and hot issues.Foreigners can also understand our country’s national conditions and principles through these speeches.Political speeches delivered by President Xi in international conventions have official English versions.They are significant resources for international public relations.As a result,the translation quality of President Xi’s political speeches has great significance,which should convey emotion and attitude of the source texts accurately to realize the maximization of state interests.Si(2018: 8)believes that seen from a perspective of functional linguistics,the essence of translation is that the meaning remains unchanged when transferring from one language to another.In the systemic functional linguistics,researchers hold the view that if three meta-functions(meaning)of the original texts can be realized in the translated texts,then the translated texts can be recognized as the ideal translated versions.The appraisal theory,which expresses attitude and emotion through appraisal words and grammar,is a further advancement of interpersonal meaning(ibid: 195).For readers,interpretation and analysis of appraisal resources can help them to understand the evident or underlying interpersonal meaning of the original texts.For translators,it is a topic worth discussing that how the appraisal meaning transfers from the source texts to the target texts accurately in translation studies,which is also an important reference for translation quality evaluation.This study takes the appraisal theory as the theoretical framework and makes a detailed statistical discussion on the appraisal resources in political speeches delivered by President Xi.By analyzing different distributions of appraisal resources between the source texts and the target texts,this thesis explores the causes of different distributions and evaluates the translation effects of the appraisal meaning.This research aims at increasing translators’ attention on appraisal resources and improving translation quality of political speeches.This thesis selects 30 political speeches made by President Xi in important international congresses on the official websites of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the China Daily as language resources,adopting a mixed-approach integrating quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore three types of appraisal resources(attitude,engagement and graduation)and their translation.This thesis focuses on the following three research questions:(1)How do the appraisal resources distribute in the original texts and translated texts of the selected speeches and what are their differences?(2)What are the causes of the nonequivalent appraisal resources between the original texts and translated texts in the process of translating?(3)What are the translation effects of the appraisal meaning in these nonequivalent appraisal resources and how can translators do to improve their translation quality?The findings are as follows:(1)There exist abundant appraisal resources in President Xi’s political speeches and the attitude resources occupy the most proportion among three subsystems.There are 4,148 units of appraisal resources in the source texts of political speeches in which the amount of attitude resources is 2,884,accounting for 69.53%,the amount of engagement resources 166,taking up 4.00%,and the amount of graduation resources 1117,accounting for 26.93%.As for the target texts,there are 4,354 units of appraisal resources on the whole.The amount of attitude resources is 3,302,engagement resources 177 and graduation resources 875.Compared with the original texts,the amount of appraisal resources in the translated texts is a little larger and the realization rate is104.97%.Specifically speaking,the distribution of three types of appraisal resources in the target texts differs from that in the source texts.The total realization rate of attitude resources is 114.49%,engagement resources 106.63% and graduation resources 78.33%.Observed from the data,attitude and engagement resources are fully translated while the translation of graduation resources is not enough.(2)The causes of different distributions of appraisal resources can be divided into two levels: lexical level and rhetorical level.The lexical level is composed of the translation methods of addition(add appraisal resources),omission(omit appraisal resources)and transfer(transfer appraisal resources).Addition often appears in translating subject-omitted sentences.The translator of the original texts is inclined to add subjects and verbs showing positive attitudes like “need” and “agree”.Besides,the translator of the original texts may also change the subject-omitted sentences into the formal subject clauses and add appreciation words like “important” and “significant”.Omission means that the translator of the original texts often chooses to delete several attitude resources.Transfer is usually used in the change of attitude resources into graduation resources.Under the rhetorical level,there are mainly two types of translation methods: parallel structure conversion and metaphorical structure conversion.In the parallel structure conversion,the translator of the original texts often shortens the repeated appraisal words into a single word or replaces them by varied appraisal words.In the target texts,the metaphorical structure is often replaced by free translation,which lowers the emotional color and the appraisal meaning of source texts.(3)From the perspective of meaning conversion,the nonequivalent appraisal resources in the target texts have reached three translation effects: equivalence of the appraisal meaning,partial equivalence of the appraisal meaning and non-equivalence of the appraisal meaning.The author finds that although in some sentences the types and quantities of appraisal resources are slightly different,most of the appraisal meaning in the original texts has been transformed into the corresponding translation.The translator of the original texts shows the appraisal meaning equivalently by using the translation methods of transferring between attitude resources and graduation resources or adding attitude resources.Partial equivalence of meaning is often caused by omitting attitude resources and graduation resources or misinterpreting some attitude resources.Non-equivalence of the appraisal meaning in this thesis is not absolute.In this thesis,non-equivalence of the appraisal meaning means that the appraisal resource ignored is not a simple word but a strong appraisal structure like the emphatic sentence,which causes a serious lack of enhanced attitudinal meaning.Therefore,this thesis classifies it as the non-equivalence of the appraisal meaning.From the perspective of the appraisal theory,the author proposes the following two suggestions to further improve the translation quality of the partial and non-equivalent appraisal meaning.On the one hand,as far as the translation of attitude resources is concerned,translators should make the expression in the target texts as equal as that in the source texts possible.For some Chinese words with deep attitudinal meaning,under the premise of conforming to the context and language habits,translators should express them in the target language instead of simply replacing them with non-attitude words.In addition,translators should not feed their own knowledge or beliefs into the target texts and what they need to do is to show the tone of the original texts equally.On the other hand,translators should lay more emphasis on graduation resources,especially the conversion of adverbs of degree,so that the graduation meaning can be conveyed accurately in the target texts.This thesis has some significance in the practical field.First,the appraisal theory is useful for translators to explore the appraisal meaning in the source texts accurately from the layers of words,syntax and context and enhance translation quality of political speeches.Second,this research testifies that the appraisal theory has an important reference value for the further enrichment of translation studies and the construction of translation quality evaluation system from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics.Third,this study may contribute to the C-E translation of political speeches and be helpful for translation practitioners’ and learners’ to improve their translating abilities.This study still has some limitations owing to the finite research time and the author’s incompetence in academic research.For each deficiency,some suggestions for further improvement have been provided.First of all,this thesis only selects 30 political speeches which cover many topics like fighting against coronavirus,environmental protection,economy development and so on,lacking a deeper analysis of the appraisal translation in speeches concerning one particular topic.Furthermore,the source of information is a little limited.In the future,researchers can focus upon a specific political topic and collect more language resources from diverse channels like XI JINPING: THE GOVERNANCE OF CHINA to make a deeper analysis of the appraisal resource translation.Second,the analysis of causes of nonequivalent appraisal resources is a little rough.This thesis only summarizes causes from a general level(lexical and rhetorical)without dividing them according to the subsystems of appraisal resources.So for future studies,researchers can discuss the causes of nonequivalent appraisal resources from the attitude,engagement and graduation resources separately.Finally,although the author tries to keep an objective position in the analysis,it is inevitable for the author to be a little subjective in the process of classifying the appraisal resources.Therefore,the author suggests future researchers constantly enrich their professional knowledge of the appraisal theory and increase the proportion of quantitative analysis to heighten the objectivity. |
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