A Contrastive Study Of English Versions Of Li Bai’s Poems From The Perspective Of Attitude In Appraisal Theory

Li Bai is a great romantic poet in Tang Dynasty of China. His poems take an important and far-reaching part in the development of Chinese classical poetry. Therefore the study of the English versions of Li Bai’s poems plays an exclusive role in the promotion of traditional Chinese culture. However, scholars in China mainly studied the translation versions of Li Bai’s poems from the perspective of aesthetics, cognitive and cultural translation theory. Meanwhile, as their studies mainly focused on Li Bai’s representative works or the images in Li Bai’s works, a quantitative research on the whole feature of his poems is needed. This study aims to adopt both the quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the selected 25 poems and the translation versions from the perspective of Attitude in Appraisal Theory.Appraisal Theory, a comparatively perfect system for the analysis of languages, is developed as the expansion of the interpersonal function under SFL. As an important part of Appraisal Theory, Attitude concerns with people’s ways of feeling. Attitude includes three types of emotions: Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. The three kinds of emotions, negative or positive, can be expressed directly or indirectly. Furthermore, force of the three kinds of attitudinal resources is another important feature that should be considered during the study of the attitudinal resources. Recently, many scholars at home and abroad paid attention to the application of Appraisal Theory in translation field. Based on the previous studies, this thesis tries to apply Appraisal Theory to the contrastive analysis of the translations of Li Bai’s poems. With UAM corpus tool, the author attempts to study the two translation versions of the 25 selected poems from a new perspective in order to show the distribution of attitudinal resources and realization of these attitudinal resources in both the original poems and the translation versions. Then, the reasons of the differences in the two translation versions are discussed.Through analysis, the thesis shows that there are abundant attitudinal resources in Li Bai’s poems and the two English versions. The positive and inscribed resources take larger proportions than the negative and invoked resources. The features of distribution of attitudinal resources are exactly responding to Li Bai’s positive romantic expression during his poems. Although the proportions of the attitudinal resources in the two translation versions are almost the same, the quantities of the attitudinal resources are different from those of the original one. During the translation process of these attitudinal resources, both of the two translators made a lot of adjustments. According to the statistics, attitudinal resources in Xu’s version are less than the original one. Lowell’s version has more attitudinal resources than the original one. Their differences are mainly showed in the sub-type of Appreciation: Reaction and Social-value and force of Attitude. During the interpretation of the poems, Xu makes more changes about the types of the resources. However, Lowell adds many resources to convey as much attitudinal information as possible. In order to fully express the original emotion, she also adds many notes at the end of translation to explain allusions. Both of them express the emotions of the original poems, but they have many different ways of dealing with various attitudinal resources because of their different cultural background, motivations and translation approaches.By carrying out such a contrastive analysis of two translation versions of Li Bai’s poems, the present study offers a new perspective for the study of the translations of Li Bai’s poems and further demonstrates the applicability of Appraisal Theory to field of translation. However, future research can also be done to further study the Engagement and Graduation in poems and the English versions..