Sentiment Analysis Of Er Ma And Its Four English Versions:An Appraisal Theory Perspective

Appraisal Theory is an extension and development of interpersonal meaning within Systemic Functional Linguistics. According to Martin and White, it is not enough to merely study language from the view of structure and function; attention should be bestowed on the object value given by the speaker through language as well. Appraisal Theory is dedicated to establishing a theoretical framework for the systematic and comprehensive study of all means of evaluative language in texts. So far, the theory has been broadly applied into text analyses of various genres and types, such as media, political, pedagogical, historical and literary texts, all of which confirm that Appraisal Theory is a flexible and robust tool for discourse analysis in terms of evaluation.However, few researchers have attempted to apply Appraisal Theory to the analysis of evaluative discourse of translated texts. When a text is about to be reproduced in the target language situated in a new cultural context, values inserted in the original are also altered accordingly through translators’ conscious or unconscious choices. Since Appraisal Theory provides an insightful perspective to identify and analyze evaluative lexis, it will also lend its way to translation studies.Affect is the core system within Appraisal framework developing along the spectrum between positive and negative polarity, mainly manifested in terms of emotive lexis. Typical examples are adjectives (such as happy, sad), nouns (such as joy, anger), adverbs (such as happily, sadly), and verbs (such as love, hate). By introducing and working within Appraisal theory, this study investigates the Affect system of Lao She’s novel Er Ma and its four English versions in order to reveal the evaluative differences, assess the translation quality, as well as probe into the translator’s decision and translation strategies beneath the variation of the appraisal resources. Moreover, this study adopts an integrated methodology of both quantitative and qualitative approaches to the sentiment analysis of Er Ma and its translations within Appraisal framework.This study found that:1) All the four TTs have more affective lexis than the ST;2) The1980version deviates most from the original in the amount of affective lexis;3) The 1984version contains more negative emotion than the other three;4) The1991version manifests more positive emotion than the other three versions, and is the version most similar to the original in terms of the frequency of emotive lexis and affect polarity.The significance of this study lies in the fact that it verifies the possibility and feasibility of applying Appraisal Theory to translation studies in evaluation-oriented text analysis. It provides an innovative approach to conduct translation quality assessment in terms of evaluation. The study highlights shifts in translation by comparing the similarities and variances of evaluative resources between the ST and TT, which can reveal translator’s choices in the translation process and the impact of social, cultural and ideological contexts in the target culture. With assistance of the sentiment analysis tool LIWC, this innovative methodology also has the potential for generating fruitful results in the studies of style in translation.