A Comparative Study Of Appraisal Resources In Three Versions Of The Simultaneous Interpretation Of Trump's Inaugural Speech

Political speeches,playing an significant role in political activities at home or abroad,are usually used to demonstrate political positionings,publicize political opinions and encourage people to get involved.Since they may not only influence people in the speakers country,but in other countries as well,interpreting them is quite necessary and important.However,considering the differences of culture backgrounds,habits of expression and other interruptions,reproducing the interpersonal meaning of political speeches during interpreting may be challenging.As an extension and development of systemic functional linguistics,Appraisal Theory,is an important tool to analyse interpersonal meaning and conduct discourse analysis.It has attracted several domestic and international scholars since its establishment.Appraisal system includes three sub-systems,which are attitude,engagement and graduation.Attitude system relates to people's emotions,assessment toward behaviors and appreciation of things.Engagement system focuses on the source of attitude and the heterogloss in a discourse.Graduation system evaluates the degree of different kinds of other appraisal resources.As an expression of interpersonal meaning from the perspective of textual semantics,appraisal theory can be a practicable means of analyzing different interpretation versions of political speech.The thesis analyzes the appraisal resources in Donald Trump's inaugural speech and three simultanenous interpretation versions,respectively from PhoenixNet,Formosa Television and China Daily's Wechat official account.We use quantitative method to compare the distribution of appraisal resources in each text and qualitative method to analyze how interpersonal meaning is realized or reproduced in the selected sentences.Results show that Trump's inaugural speech can be proved as rich in attitude resources,especially appreciation resources.However,the distributions of engagement resources and graduation resources are relatively simple.Most of the engagement resources are monogloss and nearly all graduation resources are raising ones.Trump used those appraisal resources to help publicize his “America first” principle,and all the interpretation versions have no alternation of this ideological positioning.However,thereare usually some subtle differences in the appraisal resources' distribution and interpersonal meaning reproduced in specific sentences.On the whole,the version from China Daily's Wechat official account is the most loyal to the original text and in accordance with Chinese expressions.