A Contrastive Study Of The Affect Resources In The Two English Versions Of Mu Dan Ting In Light Of Appraisal Theory

Under the historical background of "Chinese culture going out", the recommendation of translated Chinese classics becomes a priority and a heated topic. Mu Dan Ting, written by Tang Xianzu is commonly accepted as the most representative work of Chinese drama. Although the promotion of Mu Dan Ting can be regarded successful, there is still much room for improvement. In this process, the translator's role should not be overlooked. Among the numerous researches on translation evaluation, few scholars pay attention to the affect resources in the source and target texts. Most of the existent studies on text affect analysis investigate typical examples in practical texts such as political discourses. Scholars seldom probe into literary texts, let alone Chinese classics. To fill the research gap, this study attempts to analyze the realization of affect resources in the two translated versions of Mu Dan Ting.Equipped with affect analytical tools LIWC and TextMind along with textual close reading method, the thesis firstly endeavors to analyze the implementation of attitudinal resources in Mu Dan Ting and its two English versions (translated by Cyril Birch and Professor Wang Rongpei). Then the study focuses on the classification and syntactic structures of affect resources.The research finds that the attitudinal resources, especially affect resources show an overall tendency of decreasing in both two translations. Birch's version has retained and reproduced the attitudinal resources more completely, while Professor Wang's version emphasizes the detailed translation without delivering the attitudinal resources exactly. Besides, the amount of process affect has decreased and the amount of quality affect has increased in both two English versions. Meanwhile, the proportion of various affective categories of Birch's version remains in consistent with that of the source text. However, the affect categories of Professor Wang's version are kept in a pretty evenly divided state, which seems to be different from the original text. Therefore, Birch's version pays more attention to affect categories and their corresponding translation. From the perspective of affective sentences, the choices of affective syntactic structures are basically the same in the two translations. The number of sentences driven by affective nouns and verbs has far surpassed that of sentences driven by adjectives and adverbs in the translated text. The structures of "(personal) subject+ affective verb+ noun phrase" and "(personal) subject+ verb (including linking verb)+ affective nouns/noun phrase" are most frequently used by the two translators. Due to the differences from the usual syntactic structures in single English text found by previous scholars, both translators seemed to have neglected the importance of syntactic structures in expressing emotion.Meanwhile, for the translators who have undertaken the task of making the Chinese culture "go out", it is suggested that the attitudinal resources, affective categories and affective syntactic patterns should all be taken into consideration and reconstructed according to the language habits of western readers to achieve the best effect of affect transferences..