Influence Of Translator Subjectivity On Target Texts

Positive Discourse Analysis was firstly put forward by J. R. Martin in a seminar of Critical Discourse Analysis in the year of1999. Compared with CDA, PDA is quite a novel topic and provides a new perspective for discourse analysis. Once PDA was put forward by Martin, it has attracted many scholars’interest. Actually PDA is not an opposition but a complementary to CDA. The emergence of PDA makes up for the insufficiency of CDA. CDA always tries to reveal the inequality of society, whereas PDA focuses on the positive and motivating text and suggests a constructive way doing discourse analysis in order to make a better world. Appraisal Theory is the main analytical instrument of PDA.Along the history of translation studies, the role of translator has long been neglected. Scholars did not pay much attention to the studies of translator until the "Cultural Turn" in translation studies. As the subject of translation, translator exerts subjectivity in order to accomplish certain goals in the process of translation. It is common to see that there are various TTs to the same ST. The current study attempts to explore how appraisal meanings are realized in text. Based on this, how translator deals with evaluation and reproduces it will be presented by several examples. For different purposes and aims, different translators deal with evaluation in dissimilar ways. With an analysis of four selected TTs of Jane Austin’s Emma, it has been found that sometimes different translators deal with the same appraisal resources in different ways. As for the influential factors, translator subjectivity takes the responsibility by virtue of achieving rhetoric effects or adapting the expressive ways of source language to that of target language.The current study is conducted from the perspective of PDA on the influence of translator subjectivity in TTs. Moreover, this study also tends to enlighten the practice of translation for further study.