Investigating The English Translation Of The Appraisal Epithets In Chinese Political Discourse

It is widely acknowledged that discourse conveys the speaker's/writer's attitudes,stance,and the ways in which these evaluative orientations are represented in discourse certainly influences the relations among the language participants.Translation is regarded as intercultural social practice where discourse reflects the translators' attitudes and stance.Addressing issues such as the ways in which translators invest their attitudes and stance in discourse and the ways in which they mediate the source texts and the target texts,making stance varied through their choices of translation shifts,is a cross-disciplinary project of high importance.Such project is of interest not only because it reveals the translators' attitudes and stance,but also because evaluative resources can be related to the translators' positioning as construed in discourse,and also because they operate to construct the relations of alignment and rapport between the translators and other participants in translation.As China has become the second largest economy,it has attracted much attention to its policies and stance towards global issues that are largely encoded in political discourse.However,the translation of political discourse,particularly in the Chinese context,leads to conflicting arguments about how political discourse is rendered into another language.The conflicting arguments ignite the motivation for further empirical analysis of the translation of Chinese political discourse,specifically,the translation patterns of evaluation that the translators invest into the translated texts and the variations of stance that the translators,consciously or unconsciously,expressed through the translation shifts of evaluative resources.Drawing on a corpus-based approach and a combined framework of Appraisal System(Martin & White 2005)and Ideological Square(van Dijk 1998;2006),this study has investigated the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets,the most prototypical appraisal resources for evaluation,and the variations of stance towards items in Self-category,i.e.China and items in Other-category,i.e.other countries,found in the Chinese-English translation of political discourse from the year of 2000 to the year of 2015.Specifically,investigation has been conducted to reveal the similarities and differences between the general patterns of the translation of the appraisal epithets in Self-and Other-categories,those of the positive appraisal epithets in Self-and Other-categories,and those of the negative appraisal epithets,with particular attention to each sub-category of Appraisal System,viz.,Engagement,Attitude,and Graduation.This study then has investigated whether the stance towards Self,i.e.China,and Others,i.e.other countries,has been reshaped through the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse.Research findings have been generated from the comparisons and the statistical analyses with different parameters between Self-and Other-categories in terms of the translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse at both lexicogrammatical and discourse semantic levels.At the lexico-grammatical level,the main concern is the translation shifts of the appraisal epithets in both Self-and Othercategories during the translation process.At the discourse semantic level,the focus is the variations of stance towards Self and Others through the translation of the appraisal epithets in both Self-and Other-categories.Firstly,it is found that the equivalent translation strategy is more probably applied to the appraisal epithets in Self-category while more translation shifts occurred in the translation of the appraisal epithets in Other-category,although the equivalent translation strategy is the most frequently used one for the appraisal epithets in both Self-and Other-categories.Secondly,no significant difference is found between Self-and Other-categories in terms of the translation of the positive appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse while a strikingly larger proportion of the negative appraisal epithets in Other-category are translated using the nonequivalent translation strategy,compared with those negative epithets in Self-category.It is also found that there is no significant difference between the translations of the positive epithets and the negative epithets in Self-category,while a notable difference exits between the translations of the positive epithets and the negative epithets in Other-category with the non-equivalent translation strategy more frequently applied to the negative appraisal epithets.Thirdly,the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets between Self-and Other-categories vary within the sub-categories of Appraisal System.As for the translation of the appraisal epithets in Attitude,no difference between Self-and Other-categories is found.However,statistical result displays that there is more possibility that the positive Attitude epithets in Selfcategory are omitted in the TTs,among which are the positive appreciation epithets.The translation shifts in Attitude display a pattern that Self is more negatively presented in the TTs,particularly things of Self rather than its behaviour.With respect to the translation of the Engagement epithets,it is found that the Engagement epithets in Self are more likely translated through the equivalent translation strategy while the non-equivalent translation strategies are more likely applied to the Engagement epithets in Other-category,particularly the negative contractive epithets.In terms of Graduation system,a significant difference is found between the translations of the appraisal epithets in Self-and Other-categories.The pattern lies in that translation shifts slightly more often occur to the translation of the Graduation epithets in Othercategory in general while the positive down-scale Graduation epithets in Self-category are more likely translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies.Fourthly,it is found that Self-items are downgraded while Other-items are upgraded in the TTs through translation shifts in the translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse,which indicates that a more positive stance towards Other and a more negative one towards Self are reshaped in TTs.Lastly,it is argued that the translation shifts and the variations of stance in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse can largely attribute to the language differences between Chinese and English,the constraints of the General Strategy of Politeness and the ideological self-serving principle behind translation.This thesis proves to be theoretically valuable to,and adds to the growing body of research on,the Corpus-based Translation Studies and Discourse Analysis.First and foremost,this thesis proposes a revised model of Ideological Square of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation based on the empirical data of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse.Such a revised model makes noteworthy contributions in that it not only offers a more feasible and flexible framework for Translation Studies,but also moves forward one more step to promote the academic status of Translation Studies as a theory-exporting discipline rather than a discipline that always borrows theoretical models from other academic areas.Secondly,this study contributes to the field of a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis approach to Translation Studies,a still underexploited area,by bridging a corpus-based approach with a combined framework of Appraisal System and Ideological Square within a broader field of Critical Discourse Analysis.Another contribution of this study is that it enhances understanding of different ways to represent appraisal meaning and stance across different cultures,thus offering a translation perspective for Appraisal System.Practically,this study is conducive to translation teaching and translator training because it identifies the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in the ChineseEnglish translation of political discourse,with a large number of concordance lines displaying the examples of professional translation.This study is also of practical significance because it reveals the factors that influence the Chinese-English translation of political discourse,which sheds new lights on the publicity of China and its policies worldwide.