Power Construction In Political Discourse Translation

The Report on the Work of the Government(hereinafter referred to as the RWG)is a typical type of political discourse and carries power.And in the current thesis,power refers to "the ability to influence or outright control the behaviors or attitudes of other people".Owing to the fact that political discourse could affect other's opinions,embodies power and has its "evaluative function",so power construction in the thesis could be defined as to analyze how power is constructed through the attitude system,particularly through affect,judgement and appreciation.Based on Martin's Appraisal theory,the thesis,taking the RWG in 2017 as the analytic text,attempts to explore power construction and the translation of political discourse from the perspective of the attitude system.The research objective of the thesis is to explore whether the translated report has preserved,adjusted or totally changed power of the original report from the attitude system.And theoretical framework of the thesis is the attitude system(which includes affect,judgement and appreciation)in Appraisal theory.Having studied the Chinese and English version of the report,the following conclusions could be drawn.Despite the fact that the two versions of the report had different ways to construct power in terms of affect,judgment and appreciation,nevertheless,the translated version of the report successfully preserved power of the original text.There were three kinds of ways to construct power in terms of affect resources:(i)in/security resources were the most frequently used ones in the report,un/happiness resources ranked second,while dis/satisfaction resources were the least favorable resources.Besides,the two versions of the report preferred to adopt positive words regarding affect to construct power;(ii)to add certain words concerning un/happiness or in/security in the English report to adjust power of the original report;(iii)to utilize parallel synonyms regarding security resources in the original text and omit these synonyms in translation so as to preserve power of the original report.Within the judgement system,there were four ways to construct power:(?)to use positive judgement resources,such as positive capacity,tenacity and normality;(?)to employ simple words and sentences,such as "we will + verb" structure,which appeared 338 times in the RWG in 2017;(?)to omit culture-loaded words in translation;(?)to add words or phrases regarding capacity and normality when necessary in translation to preserve power of the original report.Under the framework of the appreciation system,there were three ways to construct power:(?)to use positive appreciation resources.Moreover,valuation resources were the most preferred ones,composition stood second and reaction ranked third;(?)to delete words regarding valuation resources in translation to preserve the power;(?)to paraphrase political words with Chinese characteristic in translation to preserver power.Hopefully,the thesis may shed light upon how to construct power in political discourse from angels of the affect,judgement and appreciation system.