| Translational book review (TBR), as a specific genre of academic discourse, is very important in circle of translation studies. Yet it has been paid little attention for its unremarkable features as reference literature. On one hand, the reviewer tries to evaluate books positively or negatively from the perspective translation studies. On the other hand, in response to the underlying challenge from the outer-space voices, the reviewer must try to balance the relationship between the three parties (namely, the writer of the book, the potential reader, and himself) by the use of some strategies.This thesis employs Martin's Appraisal Theory (AT). AT is a newly developed theory in the 1990s by Martin and White as the expansion of interpersonal function of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). It is a comprehensive framework for the study of interpersonal meaning, and it concerns all kinds of attitudes, which can be negotiated in discourses. This thesis examines 10 English Translational Book Reviews (ETBR) and 10 Chinese Translational Book Reviews (CTBR) respectively which are extracted from some famous journals with qualitative and quantitative analysis. The purpose is to see how the Appraisal meanings are realized by the use of Appraisal resources in TBR. The author attempts to unfold the way by which the reviewer reveals his personal attitude and voice and balances the personal relationship with the author and the readers of the reviewed book. Moreover, the author also tries to make a comparison between ETBR and CTBR in order to explore their similarities and differences in the realization of Appraisal meanings, and tries to give some possible explanations to the results of the analysis.The following are the major findings: (1) the overall tendency of the appearing frequency of three sub-systems in ETBR is different from that in CTBR. In ETBR, the engagement system is the most frequent followed by attitude and graduation, yet in CTBR; Attitude is the most frequent, followed by engagement and graduation. The frequencies of different categories of attitude in ETBR and CTBR are also different from each other; (2) in the system of Engagement, the employment of hetero-gloss is much more frequent than that of mono-gloss in both ETBR and CTBR; (3) as for the Graduation system, there is not much difference. The frequency of raise for positive attitude in ETBR is lower than that in CTBR; meanwhile, the frequency of raise for negative attitude in ETBR is slightly higher than that in CTBR. Both English and Chinese reviewers try to stand out positive attitude and blur negative attitude; (4) as far as the structure of TBR is concerned, the English book reviewer usually considers the stage of introduction as a separate unit. And the positive appreciation in CTBR is usually expressed both at the beginning stage and the ending stage among the three stages of TBR, but in ETBR, most of the positive attitudes are only found at the end of the texts. Moreover, English reviewer tends to put much value on the practical usage of the book while at the same time, Chinese reviewer play much emphasis on its theoretical significance. After the comparative analysis between ETBR and CTBR, we can come to see that AT is a helpful tool for us to conduct research on the authoritative voices and inter-subjective positioning shifts. Meanwhile we can also get a better understanding of the appraising strategies, which may enable students to acquire a better technique for reading and writing translational book reviews. It also enriches the application of Appraisal analysis. |
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