A Study On The Reproduction Of Interpersonal Meaning In The C-E Translation Of Qing Yi From The Perspective Of Appraisal System

Interpersonal function is one of the major functions of language.It means that people can express their attitudes through language,establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships with others,and try to influence other people’s view on someone or certain things.In the translation of literary works,whether the translator adequately reproduces the interpersonal meaning of the original text determines the establishment of the interpersonal relationship between the author and the target readers as well as the full comprehension of the readers of the author’s attitude and view.The appraisal system focuses on the study of interpersonal meaning by James R.Martin at the level of discourse semantics.It is also an extension and supplement to Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics in the direction of interpersonal meaning.The appraisal system consists of three sub-systems: attitudinal,engagement and graduation system.Starting from the three subsystems of appraisal system,the study adopts Qing Yi and its translation the Moon Opera by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun as research texts.After identifying and annotating the language resources that embody appraisal meaning in both the original text and target text,the study compares the tagged language resources in order to probe into the extent of the reproduction and translation strategies and methods that the translator adopted when reproducing the interpersonal meaning of the source text.Besides,the study also explores the reasons why the translator deleted some appraisal meaning of the original text.By writing such a thesis,the research,the author of the present study intends to provide a new perspective for future researchers of translation studies.The implications of the present study fall into three aspects: first of all,appraisal resources can help translators to better understand the author’s views and attitudes from the perspective of interpersonal meanings.Secondly,the detailed,well-organized and well-defined system would certainly provide researchers with a new way to evaluate the quality of the translation.In addition,the study once again demonstrates the feasibility,operability and applicability of applying appraisal to translation studies,and points out that the combination of the system and translation study is not only of great significance to theoretical research and practical activities.Moreover,it is of great significance to perfect the development of the theory itself.The major findings are as follows: firstly,appraisal resources in the source text add up to 681,the distribution of which covered the whole system except for Endorse.Compared with the source text,the resources in the target text add up to 612,69 less than that of the source text while covering the wholeappraisal system;next,after a comparison of 572 appraisal resources in the source text and target text(except for graduation resources),equivalent translation amounts to 511,which demonstrated that the translator faithfully reproduced the interpersonal meaning the author expressed in the source text to a large extent.Finally,for equivalent translation,Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia are inclined to adopt foreignization when it comes to appraisal resources possessing national color.For void translation and undertranslation,it is found that impalpable metaphors caused by different culture,the extended meanings of some Chinese words,and neglect of graduation meanings all engendered unfaithful translation.It is certain that such problems could be largely avoided if the translator can pay more attention to those details.