A Study Of The Translation Of Attitude Markers In Interactional Metadiscourse In Academic Papers From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Discourse enables the writer/speaker to construct his/her identity,status and power relationship in social practice,while metadiscourse,implying the writer/speaker’s subjective emotions and reflecting the relationship between the participants in the conversation,provides the writer/speaker with the way to exert his/her power.Translation,as a typical cross-linguistic and cross-cultural social activity,is not only an effective means to test the role of discourse in social life,but also a strong evidence to explain the manipulation of meta-discourse on discourse.In recent years,more and more scholars have been showing interest in metadiscourse,but most of them approach it from the perspectives of syntax,semantics and pragmatics,with few in-depth and systematic studies on its translation.Taking the attitude markers which reveal the emotional reality of the writer/speaker as an example,this paper attempts to further deepen the study of the translation of metadiscourse.Considering the interpersonal and evaluative function of attitude markers,this research takes the appraisal theory,an important theory of system-functional linguistics,as the theoretical basis,focusing on its attitude system.First of all,the attitude markers appearing in the research text are roughly divided,according to the three subsystems of attitude system.Furthermore,based on the semantic and contextual features of different attitude markers,the paper explores their translation from the lexical and grammatical level to the discourse communicative level,in order to reveal whether the appraisal theory can guide the translators to effectively identify and successfully reproduce the attitude of the original author in the process of translation.The results of the study show that the attitude resources of appraisal theory are of great guiding significance for the translation of attitude markers,which can help translators to identify and analyze different kinds of attitude markers in the text,so as to understand and successfully convey the attitudes and positions of the authors.Through the analysis of specific translation examples,it is found that most explicit attitude markers,which are able to encode prescribed meaning through their semantic features,can easily find their corresponding translation in Chinese,while the implicit attitude markers often need to be analyzed according to their context,and then are translated with appropriate translation techniques,such as conversion of part of speech,subject conversion,and addition.In a word,omission will not be chosen in most cases for the translation of attitude markers.Even if some adverbs are sometimes omitted,the appraisal attitude implied in them needs to be presented in the translation in another way.