An Appraisal Of The Chinese Translation Of Life Without Limits From The Perspective Of The Appraisal Theory

As the exchanges among countries in the world keep improving in both depth and width, the importance of translation becomes increasingly prominent. In the process of translation, it remains a major problem to translators how to get the overall attitude of the source text (ST) and re-present it in the target text (TT) (Zhang Xiangang,2007:35), which is of vital importance if translators want to improve the quality of their translation and maximize the chance so that the readers of TT can get the same information as the readers of ST. As the recent Appraisal Theory (AT) has been praised as the most comprehensive tool for analyzing attitude to date (ibid.), this thesis is an attempt to apply AT to the study of translation.AT mainly deals with the interpersonal function under the framework of SFL. Since its birth, AT has been applied to more and more areas, from the discourse analysis to foreign language education, literary analysis, translation studies, etc. However, the application of AT in translation studies is much less than that in other areas and is quite narrow, often in the analysis of translation of short texts, such as brands and advertisements, as well as in the comparison and analysis of different versions of translation of one article or book, but not so much in the evaluation and analysis of a single version of translated publications.In the thesis, Nick Vujicic’s Life Without Limits and its Chinese version are chosen for using AT to locate the parts that contain evaluative elements like author’s affect, attitude, stance and so on, and then the translation of those parts are analyzed for accuracy, and if not, suggestions are made for correction and improvement.Many evaluative elements are found in Life Without Limits and its Chinese translation, some of which are explicit evaluation and others implicit evaluation. Although most of the evaluative elements are properly translated, there are still improvements to be made. In this thesis, evaluate and analyze the translation quality of the single version of translated publications from the perspective of AT is proved to be feasible and can help to enhance the overall quality of the translation.