Reappraising Self and Others: A Corpus-Based Study of Chinese Political Discourse in English Translation (Corpora and Intercultural Studies, 6) 9811594872, 9789811594878

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Corpora and Intercultural Studies 6

Tao Li Kaibao Hu

Reappraising Self and Others A Corpus-Based Study of Chinese Political Discourse in English Translation

Corpora and Intercultural Studies Volume 6

Series Editors Kaibao Hu, Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China Hongwei Ding, School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

This book series publishes original monographs and edited volumes in the investigations of different types of corpora (including text, speech and video) with a particular focus on intercultural studies. The differences in language use expressed in comparable corpora can be analyzed from an intercultural perspective. The emphasis is on excellence and originality in scholarship as well as synergetic interdisciplinary approaches and multicultural perspectives. Books exploring the role of the intercultural studies in the research fields of translation, linguistics, and culture, with a corpus-based approach will be especially welcome. The series publishes books that deal with emerging issues as well as those that offer an in-depth examination of underlying issues. The target audiences of this series include both scholars and professionals who are interested in issues related to intercultural communication across different cultures and social groups, which are reflected by the investigation in comparable corpora. Corpora and Intercultural Studies book series is published in conjunction with Springer under the auspices of School of Foreign Languages (SFL), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). The first series editor is the Dean of SFL at SJTU, and the book series editorial board consists of leading scholars in the research field of corpora and intercultural studies in the world.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15588

Tao Li · Kaibao Hu

Reappraising Self and Others A Corpus-Based Study of Chinese Political Discourse in English Translation

Tao Li Centre for Corpus Research Shanghai Ocean University Shanghai, China

Kaibao Hu Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications Shanghai International Studies University Shanghai, China

ISSN 2510-4802 ISSN 2510-4810 (electronic) Corpora and Intercultural Studies ISBN 978-981-15-9487-8 ISBN 978-981-15-9488-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9488-5 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

It is widely acknowledged that discourse conveys the speaker’s/writer’s attitudes, stance, and the ways in which these evaluative orientations are represented in discourse certainly have an influence on the relations among the involved participants. Translation is regarded as intercultural social practice where discourse reflects the translators’ attitudes and stance. Addressing issues such as the ways in which translators mediate the source texts (hereafter the STs) and the target texts (hereafter the TTs) and the ways in which they invest their own attitudes and stance in the translated texts, making stance varied through their choices of translation shifts, is an interdisciplinary project of high importance. Such project is important and of great interest not only because it reveals the translators’ attitudes and stance, but also because evaluative resources can be related to the translators’ positioning as construed in discourse, and also because they operate to construct the relations of alignment and rapport between the translators and other participants in translation. China has become the second largest economy after over 40 years of reform and opening-up since 1978 and is now playing an increasingly important role in the international arena, particularly in this difficult time of COVID-19 pandemic. It thus has attracted wide attention from other countries to its policies and stance that are largely encoded in political discourse. However, the translation of political discourse, particularly in the Chinese context, leads to conflicting arguments about how political discourse is rendered into another language and such arguments have been continuing. For example, Wu (2010) argues to remove some adjectives and adverbs in the English translation of Chinese political discourse because they are overused and thus redundant. Yet a translator of Chinese political discourse responds that the removal of these epithets in the English translation would distort the original meanings and maintains that those who consider them as ‘redundant’ actually ignore the fact that they are used in the genre of political discourse (Wang 2011). The conflicting arguments ignite the motivation for further empirical analysis of the English translation of Chinese political discourse, specifically, the translation patterns of evaluation that the translators invest into the translated texts and the variations of stance that the translators, consciously or unconsciously, expressed through their choice of translation shifts of evaluative resources. v

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Preface

The primary concern of this book is to investigate the ways in which China’s attitudes and stance towards itself and other countries in Chinese political discourse are represented in the English translation through the translators’ mediation. To achieve this goal, we draw on a combined framework of Appraisal System1 (Martin and White 2005) and the Ideological Square Model (van Dijk 1998) and a corpus-based discourse analysis approach, firstly to identify the translation patterns of appraisal epithets, “the most prototypical to convey evaluative meaning” (Munday 2012, 103), and secondly, the variations of stance towards China and other countries in the Chinese-English translation of political discourse. Specifically, the investigation has been conducted to reveal the similarities and differences at many levels, for example, between the translation patterns of the positive appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories, and those of the negative appraisal epithets, with particular attention to each sub-category of Appraisal System, viz., Engagement, Attitude, and Graduation. Research findings have been generated from the comparisons and the statistical analyses with different parameters between the Self-category and the Other-category in terms of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. Firstly, it is found that the equivalent translation strategy is more probably applied to the appraisal epithets in the Self-category while more translation shifts occurred in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Other-category, although the equivalent translation strategy is the most frequently used one for the appraisal epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories. Secondly, no significant difference is found between the Self-category and the Other-category in terms of the English translation of the positive appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse while a strikingly larger proportion of the negative appraisal epithets in the Other-category are translated with the non-equivalent translation strategies, compared with those negative epithets in the Self-category. It is also found that there is no significant difference between the English translations of the positive epithets and the negative epithets in the Self-category, while a notable difference exists between the English translations of the positive epithets and the negative epithets in the Other-category with the non-equivalent translation strategies more frequently applied to the negative appraisal epithets. Thirdly, the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets between the Self-category and the Other-category vary within the sub-categories of Appraisal System. As for the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Attitude system, no difference between the Self-category and the Other-category is found. However, the statistical result displays that there is more possibility that the positive Attitude epithets in the Self-category are omitted in the TTs, among which are the positive appreciation epithets. The translation shifts in the Attitude system display a pattern that Self is more negatively presented in the TTs, particularly things of Self rather than its behaviour. With respect to the English translation of the Engagement epithets, it is found that 1 Wang

and Zhang (2013) conducts an interview with professor James Martin, in which Martin suggests “Appraisal System” instead of “Appraisal Theory” because Appraisal System is an analytical tool within the theoretical framework of SFL rather than a theory in itself.

Preface

vii

the Engagement epithets in Self are more likely translated through the equivalent translation strategy while the non-equivalent translation strategies are more likely applied to the Engagement epithets in the Other-category, particularly the negative contractive epithets. In terms of the Graduation system, a significant difference is found between the English translations of the appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories. The pattern lies in that translation shifts slightly more often occur to the English translation of the Graduation epithets in the Other-category in general while the positive down-scaling Graduation epithets in the Self-category are more likely translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies. Fourthly, it is found that the Self-items are downgraded while the Other-items are upgraded in the TTs through translation shifts in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse, which indicates that a more positive stance towards Other and a more negative one towards Self are reshaped in the TTs. Lastly, it is argued that the translation shifts and the variations of stance in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse can largely attribute to the language differences between Chinese and English, the constraints of the General Strategy of Politeness and the ideological self-serving principle behind translation. With these interesting findings, this book proves itself to be theoretically valuable to, and adds to the growing body of research on, the Corpus-based Translation Studies and Discourse Analysis. First and foremost, this book proposes a revised model of the Ideological Square of positive self-presentation and negative otherpresentation based on the empirical data of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. Such a revised model makes noteworthy contributions in that it not only offers a more feasible and flexible framework for Translation Studies, but also moves forward one more step to promote the academic status of Translation Studies as a theory-exporting discipline rather than a discipline that always borrows theoretical models from other academic areas. Secondly, this book provides an effective experiment to adopt a corpus-based (critical) discourse analysis approach to Translation Studies by bridging a corpus-based approach with a combined framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square within a broader field of Critical Discourse Analysis. Such an approach is proved highly useful in identifying the translation patterns and the ideology behind these patterns in the process of translation. Another contribution of this book is that it enhances understanding of different ways to represent appraisal meaning and stance across different cultures, thus also offering a translation perspective for Appraisal System. This book is also conducive to translation education and translator training because it helps identify the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in the ChineseEnglish translation of political discourse, with a large number of concordance lines displaying the examples of professional translation. This study is of practical significance also because it reveals the factors that influence the English translation of political discourse, which sheds new lights on the ways of the publicity of a country and its policies worldwide. Finally, we would very much like to take this chance to extend our sincerest thanks to the following colleagues in Translation Studies or (Critical) Discourse Analysis

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Preface

for their help and insightful suggestions: Prof. Mona Baker and Prof. Luis Pérez González at the University of Manchester, Prof. James Martin at the University of Sydney, Prof. Teun A. van Dijk at Pompeu Fabra University, Prof. Yifan Zhu and Dr. Kyung Hye Kim at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dr. Yujie Liu at Beijing Normal University, Prof. Yongmo Zhou and Associate Professor Chun Liu at Shanghai Ocean University. We are also grateful to the brilliant team at Springer: Rebecca Zhu, Carolyn Zhang, Shalini Monica Clement Selvam, and John Justin Thomyyar. In addition, this book is part of the project by Shanghai Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science ‘The Discursive Pattern of National Image in English Translation of Chinese Political Discourse’ (2017BYY009). Shanghai, China

Tao Li Kaibao Hu

References Martin, James Robert, and Peter White. 2005. The language of evaluation: appraisal in English. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Munday, Jeremy. 2012. Evaluation in translation: critical points of translator decision-making. London: Routledge. van Dijk, Teun A. 1998. Ideology: a multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage. Wang, Ping Xing (王平兴). 2011. “Rethinking of ‘Redundant Shifts’ in Chinese-English Translation (关于汉英翻译“迁移性冗余”的一些思考).” Chinese Translators Journal (中国翻译) (5):79– 83. Wang, Zhen Hua (王振华), and Qing Bin Zhang (张庆彬). 2013. “The Development of Systemic Functional Linguistics: Beyond the Clause (系统功能语言学的演变:小句之外——J·R· 马丁 教授访谈录).” Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies (当代外语研究) (10): 1–12. Wu, Guang Jun (武光军). 2010. “Redundant Shifts in the English Translation of the 2010 Report on the Work of the Government: Analysis and Solutions (2010年政府工作报告英译本中的迁 移性冗余:分析与对策).” Chinese Translators Journal (中国翻译) (6):64–68.

Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Research Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Evaluation in Political Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.1 Appraisal System and Appraisal Epithets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.2 The Genre of Political Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.3 Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Research Questions and Significance of This Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Structure of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 3 3 4 6 6 7 9

2 Corpus-Based Translation Studies and Political Discourse Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Review of Corpus-Based Translation Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1 CTS in General . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.2 CTS in the Chinese Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Political Discourse Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 Political Discourse in General . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 Political Discourse Analysis in the Chinese Context . . . . . . . 2.2.3 Political Discourse in Translation Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Appraisal System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 Appraisal System in Discourse Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.2 Appraisal System in Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis . . . . 2.3.3 Appraisal System in Translation Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

13 13 13 15 25 25 27 29 33 34 35 37 40 41

3 Theoretical Framework and Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 A Combined Theoretical Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 Appraisal System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2 The Ideological Square Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.3 Summary of Theoretical Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 Research Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53 53 53 55 58 58 59 ix

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Contents

3.2.2 Corpus Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.3 Data Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.4 Data Analysis with Comparison Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

59 61 80 82 83

4 Translation of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse . . . . 85 4.1 Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 4.1.1 Distribution of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 4.1.2 Frequency of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 4.2 Translation of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 4.2.1 Translation of Attitude Epithets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 4.2.2 Translation of Engagement Epithets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 4.2.3 Translation of Graduation Epithets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 4.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.1 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets in General . . . . . . 5.1.2 Translation Patterns of Attitude Epithets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.3 Translation Patterns of Engagement Epithets . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1.4 Translation Patterns of Graduation Epithets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Variations of Stance Through Translating Appraisal Epithets . . . . . . 5.2.1 Variations of Stance Through Translating Attitude Epithets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.2 Variations of Stance Through Translating Engagement Epithets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.3 Variations of Stance Through Translating Graduation Epithets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.4 Variations of Stance Through Translating Appraisal Epithets in Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Theoretical Account for Translation Shifts and Variations of Stance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.1 A Linguistic Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.2 A Politeness Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.3 An Ideological Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.4 A Further Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

121 121 122 126 138 145 152 153 155 156 159 160 160 163 168 174 178 179

Contents

6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Revisiting Translation Patterns and Variations of Stance . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Contributions and Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Directions for Future Studies: Problems and Prospects . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xi

181 181 184 186 189

Appendices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

Abbreviations

BNC CDA COCA CPC CTS LCMC POS SFL SL SPSS ST TL TORCH TT

British National Corpus Critical Discourse Analysis Corpus of Contemporary American English The Communist Party of China Corpus-based Translation Studies Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese Part of Speech Systemic Functional Linguistics Source Language Statistical Package of the Social Science Source Text Target Language Texts of Recent Chinese Target Text

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8 Fig. 3.9 Fig. 3.10 Fig. 3.11 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

An overview of appraisal system (Martin and White 2005: 38) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The list and the number of the self-items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The list and the number of the other-items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The concordance lines of the self-items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The concordance lines of the other-items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The collocates of the Self-items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The collocates of the other-items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The overall comparison model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The comparison model for engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The comparison model for attitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The comparison model for graduation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Distribution of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Distribution of the appraisal epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ideological Square constrained by the General Strategy of Politeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A revised version of the Ideological Square Model . . . . . . . . . . .

55 62 63 63 64 65 65 80 80 81 81 86 88 169 171

xv

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 4.7 Table 4.8 Table 4.9 Table 4.10 Table 4.11 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 5.5 Table 5.6 Table 5.7 Table 5.8

The Chinese-English parallel corpus of political discourse . . . . Distribution of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frequency of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the affect epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the judgement epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the appreciation epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the Engagement epithets in Self-category . . . . . . Translation of the Engagement epithets in Other-category . . . . Translation of the force epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the focus epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the force epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the focus epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . Translation of all appraisal epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of all appraisal epithets between Selfand Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of all positive appraisal epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of all negative appraisal epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of all positive appraisal epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of all negative appraisal epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive and negative appraisal epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive and negative appraisal epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

59 86 88 92 93 96 100 100 104 104 105 105 122 122 123 123 124 124 124 125 xvii

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Table 5.9 Table 5.10 Table 5.11 Table 5.12 Table 5.13 Table 5.14 Table 5.15 Table 5.16 Table 5.17 Table 5.18 Table 5.19 Table 5.20 Table 5.21 Table 5.22 Table 5.23 Table 5.24 Table 5.25 Table 5.26 Table 5.27 Table 5.28 Table 5.29 Table 5.30

List of Tables

Translation pattern between the appraisal epithets with different polarities in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern between the appraisal epithets with different polarities in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of all Attitude epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of all Attitude epithets between Selfand Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of all positive Attitude epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of all negative Attitude epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of all positive Attitude epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of all negative Attitude epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive and negative Attitude epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive and negative Attitude epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern between the Attitude epithets with different polarities in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern between Attitude epithets with different polarities in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of all judgement epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of all judgement epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive judgement epithets in Selfand Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the negative judgement epithets in Selfand Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of the positive judgement epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of the negative judgement epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive and negative judgement epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive and negative judgement epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern between the judgement epithets with different polarities in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern between the judgement epithets with different polarities in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

125 126 126 127 127 127 128 128 128 129 129 130 130 131 131 131 131 132 132 132 133 133

List of Tables

Table 5.31 Table 5.32 Table 5.33 Table 5.34 Table 5.35 Table 5.36 Table 5.37 Table 5.38 Table 5.39 Table 5.40 Table 5.41 Table 5.42 Table 5.43 Table 5.44 Table 5.45 Table 5.46 Table 5.47 Table 5.48 Table 5.49 Table 5.50 Table 5.51 Table 5.52

xix

Translation pattern of all appreciation epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of all appreciation epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of the positive appreciation epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive appreciation epithets in Selfand Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the negative appreciation epithets in Selfand Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of the negative appreciation epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive and negative appreciation epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive and negative appreciation epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern between the appreciation epithets with different polarities in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern between the appreciation epithets with different polarities in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of all Engagement epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of all Engagement epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of all contractive epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of all contractive epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive contractive epithets in Selfand Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the negative contractive epithets in Selfand Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of the positive contractive epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of the negative contractive epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of all expansive epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of all expansive epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive contractive and expansive epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the negative contractive and expansive epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

134 134 135 135 135 136 136 136 136 137 138 138 139 139 140 140 140 141 141 142 142 142

xx

Table 5.53 Table 5.54 Table 5.55 Table 5.56 Table 5.57 Table 5.58 Table 5.59 Table 5.60 Table 5.61 Table 5.62 Table 5.63 Table 5.64 Table 5.65 Table 5.66 Table 5.67 Table 5.68 Table 5.69 Table 5.70 Table 5.71 Table 5.72 Table 5.73 Table 5.74

List of Tables

Translation pattern between the positive contractive and expansive epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern between the negative contractive and expansive epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive contractive and expansive epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the negative contractive and expansive epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern between the positive contractive and expansive epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern between the negative contractive and expansive epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of all Graduation epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of all Graduation epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive up-scale Graduation epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the positive down-scale Graduation epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of the positive up-scale Graduation epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of the positive down-scale Graduation epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the negative up-scale Graduation epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the negative down-scale Graduation epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of the negative up-scale Graduation epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern of the negative down-scale Graduation epithets between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the up-scale and down-scale positive Graduation epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the up-scale and down-scale negative Graduation epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern between the up-scale and down-scale positive Graduation epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern between the up-scale and down-scale negative Graduation epithets in Self-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the up-scale and down-scale positive Graduation epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the up-scale and down-scale negative Graduation epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

143 143 143 144 144 145 146 146 147 147 147 148 148 148 149 149 149 149 150 150 151 151

List of Tables

Table 5.75 Table 5.76 Table 5.77 Table 5.78 Table 5.79 Table 5.80 Table 5.81 Table 5.82 Table 5.83

xxi

Translation pattern between the up-scale and down-scale positive Graduation epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation pattern between the up-scale and down-scale negative Graduation epithets in Other-category . . . . . . . . . . . . . Variations of stance in Attitude in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translation of the deny epithets in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Variations of stance in deny in Self- and Other-categories . . . . Variations of stance in Graduation in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Variations of stance in Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . . . . . . Variations of stance between Self- and Other-categories . . . . . . The component maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness (Leech 2014: 91) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

151 152 154 155 156 158 159 159 164

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 Research Background As Vološinov (1973: 105) argues, “no utterance can be put together without value judgement. Every utterance is above all an evaluative orientation (emphasis in original)”. It is widely acknowledged that discourse conveys the speaker’s/writer’s attitudes and stance, and the way in which these evaluative orientations are represented certainly have influences on the relations among the participants involved in discourse, either positively or negatively. The investigation of evaluation is of interest not only because it reveals the speaker’s/writer’s feelings, attitudes, and stances, but also because these evaluative expressions can be related to the speaker’s/writer’s positionings or authority as construed by the text, and also because they operate rhetorically to construct relations of alignment and rapport between the writer/speaker and actual or potential respondents (Martin and White 2005: 2). Translation is often regarded as intercultural social practice in which every piece of discourse reflects the speaker’s/writer’s evaluation in one way or another, either positive or negative. Such evaluation is central to communication and central to translation (Munday 2012a: 11), because those participants’ evaluation in translation is represented through language, thus having an impact on the relations among them in translation process. Also, the way in which translation is conducted embodies those participants’ stances and endeavour to achieve rapport among them in their use of language. Based on the above analysis, we may raise some questions: (1) How is evaluation in the source language (hereafter SL) represented in the target language (hereafter TL)? (2) What role do the translation participants play in the representation of evaluation? (3) To what extent will the translators invest their own stance into the translated texts and how? To find answers to these questions, we have to find the ways to clarify evaluation and a framework to analyse evaluation, especially the ways in which evaluation is represented in discourse. Among the frameworks of evaluation in discourse analysis, Appraisal System is regarded as the only systematic and most fully developed, elaborate framework of © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Li and K. Hu, Reappraising Self and Others, Corpora and Intercultural Studies 6, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9488-5_1

1

2

1 Introduction

evaluative language to describe the way language is used to evaluate, to negotiate social relations, to adopt social stance and to reveal the ideology behind it (Bednarek 2006: 32; Thompson and Hunston 2006: 308). Appraisal System (see in detail Martin 2000; Martin and Rose 2003; Martin and White 2005; Bednarek 2008; Hood 2010; Hood and Martin 2010), once also referred to as Appraisal Theory, is proposed as a framework within in the Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL) to describe evaluative meaning in language. It extends the SFL account of the interpersonal meaning, one of the three metafunctions of language (Halliday 1994: 35–36). It has been widely employed in recent years to analyse texts of many different genres, including news reports (e.g., Bednarek and Caple 2010; Huan 2016; White 2012), literary discourse (e.g., Love 2006; Page 2003; Unsworth 2015), business discourse (e.g., Hommerberg and Don 2015; Pounds 2011), academic discourse (e.g., Geng and Wharton 2016; Hood 2010; Sheldon 2018), medical discourse (e.g., Adendorff et al. 2009; Gallardo and Ferrari 2010), and educational discourse (e.g., Kakti¸nš 2014; Myskow 2018), to name just a few. A number of studies on Appraisal System have been carried out in different languages too, including English, Chinese, Portuguese, and German. Appraisal System echoes studies on evaluation (Hunston and Thompson 2000; Bednarek 2006), yet it moves forward, departing from previous studies that it extends traditional grammatical research of interpersonal meaning at a clause level (e.g., mood and modality system) to a discourse level within discourse semantics (Martin 1992; Martin and Rose 2003). It also offers a clear and more systemic categorisation of evaluative meaning which helps us understand not only the rhetorical effects of appraisal lexis, but also the interplay between interpersonal meaning and social relations in the model of language and solidarity (Bednarek 2008). However, since “SFL is traditionally qualitative, looking at individual pieces of discourse of relatively small size” (Kaltenbacher 2007: 90), Appraisal System within the theoretical framework of SFL has been so far predominantly applied to the analysis of individual texts or of relatively small corpora (e.g., Miller 2006). In Translation Studies, numerous studies have been devoted to the examination of the representation of the ideational and the textual meaning (e.g., Huang 2013; Kim 2007), but the representation of the interpersonal meaning, the appraisal meaning in particular, has largely been ignored. This may be due to the fact that the scholars in SFL and Appraisal System more often than not deal with monolingual text rather than translations that are usually concerned with bilingual or multilingual texts. Academics in linguistic fields have also failed to realise the fact that translated language has its own features and thus is different from both SL and TL. The application of Appraisal System into translation studies was initiated in China since this evaluation framework was soon introduced to China the following year it was proposed (see Wang 2001) and Translation Studies started to boom in later 1990s when many new concepts and theories in Linguistics and Translation Studies were introduced to China. Some papers, for example Zhang (2002), Qian (2007), are among the first studies to adopt this systemic descriptive framework of evaluation in Translation Studies. As Munday (2012b) indicates, the use of Appraisal System, centring on the realisation of interpersonal meaning, is a new direction in discourse

1.1 Research Background

3

analysis for translation. Nevertheless, such new area has remained largely underexploited and some sporadic studies are mainly limited to the analysis of a very small number of texts. Even though some studies claim to adopt a corpus approach (e.g., Souza 2010; Munday 2012a), they are either limited to the analysis of an individual text or the corpus they use are very small-scale ones, which means more research relying on larger dataset is still necessary and further justification is still needed for more reliable and generalised conclusions.

1.2 Evaluation in Political Discourse 1.2.1 Appraisal System and Appraisal Epithets It is clear to us all that “whenever speakers (or writers) say anything, they encode their point of view towards it” (Stubbs 1996: 197) and it is certainly not hard to believe that “all utterances are seen as in some way stanced or attitudinal” (Martin and White 2005: 92). Translation involves language use and thus the process of translation certainly involves attitudes and stance of the translation participants, transferring from the writer/speaker to the translator (or other players in mediation such as a translation agency), and from the translator to the listeners/readers of the receiving end. Appraisal System deals with attitudes and stance, specifically “the means by which writer /speakers positively or negatively evaluate the entities, happenings and states-of-affairs with which their texts are concerned” (Martin & White 2005: 2). It covers three sub-categories, viz., Engagement, Attitude, and Graduation.1 According to Martin and White (2005: 35), Attitude is concerned with “our feelings, including emotional reactions, judgements of behaviour and evaluation of things” whereas Engagement deals with “sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in discourse”, and Graduation attends to “grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred”. Appraisal System is regarded as “(t)he most fully developed current model of values in discourse” (Thompson and Hunston 2006: 308) and “the only systematic, detailed and elaborate framework of evaluative language” (Bednarek 2006: 32). It proves itself to be a useful analytical framework to describe the way in which language is used to evaluate, to negotiate social relations, to adopt social stance and to reveal ideology behind language use. Among linguistic units, appraisal epithet is the most prototypical to convey evaluative meaning (Munday 2012a: 103). According to the online Oxford English Dictionary, epithet is “an adjective indicating some quality or attribute which the speaker or writer regards as characteristic of the person or thing described”, but tends to suggest “an offensive or derogatory expression”. But within SFL, Halliday (1994: 184) explains that epithet “may be an objective property of the thing itself; or it may 1 The

first letter of these sub-categories of Appraisal System is capitalised in the rest of the book to mark them as key terms.

4

1 Introduction

be an expression of the speaker’s subjective attitude towards it”, and “most of the latter are adjectives of size, quality or age” (ibid.). However, as far as adjectives are concerned, some studies show that recent studies carried out in the field of linguistics tend to merge adjectives and adverbs into one category since they both express similar semantic functions (Berk 1999; Biber et al. 1999). Martin and White (2005: 145) also mentions that the property of a verb process can be realised both by adjectives and adverbs. Unlike previous studies (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014: 376), appraisal epithet in this study, therefore, is defined as any adjective or adverb which indicates the speaker’s or writer’s attitudinal view on the property of feelings, behaviours, or things, either positive or negative, the source or the gradability of these attitudinal views. It is also worthy of mention that Appraisal System is based on language in actual use and places emphasise on the probability of language use, which are also typical features of studies in both SFL and corpus linguistics. It can, therefore, help discover the patterns featured in authentic translated texts, where translated texts are treated as a distinctive language variety and translation process as authentic intercultural communication. In particular, addressing issues such as the ways in which appraisal meanings and stance conveyed by the positive or the negative epithets in SL are represented in TL will help reveal the power relations and the ideological positioning of the translation participants on the one hand, and, on the other, enhance the understanding of how translators or translation agency realise rapport through translation with listeners/readers of the receiving end.

1.2.2 The Genre of Political Discourse This book focuses on the genre of political discourse for the following reasons. Firstly, conflicting arguments still exist among the translation of political discourse, particularly in the Chinese context. Such conflicting arguments ignite our interest to investigate what the translations of political discourse really demonstrate, what translation patterns there exist. House (2008) argues that “as a translator…one must be aware of one’s responsibility to the original author and his or her texts, …In manyif not most-cases it might be wiser to not intervene at all”. Echoed to this argument in the context of the Chinese–English translation of political discourse, some senior translators of Chinese political discourse assert that translators of political discourse should be strictly loyal to the original text without changing any word at random, even the word order, to avoid committing political blunders (Cheng 2003; Wang 2011). By contrast, some other scholars argue that the mechanical translation of political issues will probably lead to misunderstanding of China and China’s policies and then recommend sort of adaption of the original texts for easy understanding of the foreign audience (Huang 2004; Wu 2010). Arguments about how to translate Chinese political discourse have never ceased, even between those translators themselves. The second reason for our choice of political discourse is that political discourse is the main means reflecting the policies and stance of a country. We regard political

1.2 Evaluation in Political Discourse

5

discourse in its narrow sense as the “institution political discourse” (Chilton 2004: 72), including official documents, political speeches, press conferences, etc. Political discourse has long been an important theme in discourse analysis and the importance of language in politics has never been neglected. As Cedroni (2013) describes, “[T]he political language is the language of power, … a contractual interaction that can determine cooperation or competition”. The analysis of political discourse does not simply reflect events which take place in the world, yet interprets these events and formulates understandings, thus making a new reality (Okulska and Cap 2010: 4). According to Chilton (2004: 6) political activity does not exist without the use of language and the doing of politics is predominantly constituted in language. Indeed, as China has become the top trader to many countries and is playing an increasingly important role in the international community, more and more Chinese political texts are translated into other languages. Also as China has given more and more voices and China became more visible in this globalised world, more people in other countries who happen to relate themselves with China through chances like investment, education, travelling, etc., have become more interested in China’s policies and stance in related fields, which has resulted in an exponential increase in the number of translations of Chinese political discourse into other languages. So the investigation of the English translation of Chinese political discourse is not only possible, but also of interest to find translation patterns though the translators have different views on how to translate Chinese political discourse and ideology behind the translations, and thus worthy. Thirdly, this study chooses political discourse for investigation also because of the requirement for computer processing of Chinese. Chinese, unlike the Indo-European Languages, is coded without a space between words. So Chinese has to be segmented in advance in order to meet the requirements of some widely used corpus software such as WordSmith, ParaConc. Given that word segmentation has long time been a hot but difficult issue in Chinese studies, an automatic word segmentation and partof-speech (hereafter POS) tagging software ICTCLAS is adopted in this study, the one which has been most widely used in corpus studies in the Chinese context (Xiao 2010). Of note is that ICTCLAS is trained on dataset from China Daily, a Chinese newspaper by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which is very similar to the genre of Chinese political discourse. By the choice of political discourse, the accuracy of the word segmenting and POS tagging is highly increased, which in turn improves the reliability of this study. The reasons we selected the Chinese political texts to build a Chinese-English parallel corpus for this study from the year of 2000 are two folds. Firstly, 2000 is the new millennium and the time when government work report was delivered openly to the public.2 For consistency, all texts of political genre selected are after 2000 to make all of them under the cover of the same period. Secondly, data used in previous studies on the Chinese-English translation of political discourse are largely outdated, not including the newly published ones. Therefore the texts after the new

2 See

www.guancha.cn/politics/2014_03_05_211231.shtml?XGYD/ retrieved on June 1st, 2015.

6

1 Introduction

millennium are expected to generate new insights in translation studies of recent political discourse.

1.2.3 Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis This research is interdisciplinary in nature in that it is largely rooted in Translation Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis (hereafter CDA), making possible the analysis of ideological positioning and power relations among the translation participants, and allowing a detailed investigation of the Chinese-English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. CDA, which argues that language is socially determined and discourse is a form of social practice, attempts to uncover the relationship between language and power, and the relationship between language and ideology (Fairclough 1989: 17). It also illustrates that ideology is linguistically encoded and the most effective way to decode the ideologically demystified meanings is by studying the discourse. Among various models suggested in CDA, the Ideological Square Model (van Dijk 1998: 267), i.e., the polarisation of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, is a well-known and often adopted framework for Discourse Analysis. Here we also stress, as van Dijk (1998: 10) does, ideologies are not inherently negative, nor limited to social structures of domination. CDA has long been under severe criticism because any discourse analysis cannot avoid personal bias of analysts (e.g., Stubbs 1997; Widdowson 2004: 102). To respond to the criticisms, CDA, traditionally relaying on introspection and theoretical deduction, has recently turned to a new research paradigm combining corpus-based quantitative study and qualitative theoretical analysis, such as Baker et al. (2013), Baker et al. (2019). Large-scale corpora help avoid personal bias and the subjectivity of the analysis to an extent, and at the same time, a corpus approach allows researchers to capture the repetitive patterns revealed in texts under investigation. Stubbs (2001: 215) argues that “repeated patterns show that evaluative meanings are not merely personal and idiosyncratic, but widely shared in a discourse community”. The adoption of a corpus approach to identify these repeated patterns that instantiate appraisal meaning can, therefore, help uncover the shared cultural and ideological stereotype in the discourse community and the discourse producers’ stance and their alignment with the actual or potential audience within the shared sociocultural context.

1.3 Research Questions and Significance of This Study In this book, we aim to identify the English translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse and reveal the translators’ ideological positionings and stance towards China and other countries in the translation process. To achieve our aim, we draw on a combined framework of Appraisal System and the

1.3 Research Questions and Significance of This Study

7

Ideological Square Model and adopt a corpus-based discourse analysis approach. Specifically, this book addresses the following research questions: 1. To what extent are the appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories3 in the Chinese STs shifted in the English TTs respectively? 2. To what extent are the English translations of the positive and the negative appraisal epithets in the Self-category different from those in the Other-category respectively? 3. To what extent is the Self-category different from the Other-category with respect to the English translation of the appraisal epithets in each of the sub-categories of Appraisal System respectively? 4. How are the stances towards China or other countries reshaped through the English translation of the appraisal epithets? 5. What factors can account for the Chinese-English translation of the appraisal epithets related to the above research results? It is hoped that this study can deepen understanding of the Chinese-English translation of the appraisal epithets in political discourse and enrich the literature in corpus-based discourse analysis approach to Translation Studies. We think this study is of theoretical significance in that it contributes to Translation Studies by applying a combined framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model with a corpus approach. Specifically, it provides a corpus-based discourse analysis of the Chinese-English translation of the appraisal epithets in political discourse by drawing on a combined framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model, a framework which has been less, if not never, conducted in Corpus-based Translation Studies (hereafter CTS) and Discourse Analysis. Another contribution of this study is that it enhances understanding of different ways to represent appraisal meanings and stance across different cultures, thus offering a translation perspective of appraisal research. Practically, this study is also conducive to translation teaching and translator training because it identifies the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in the Chinese-English translation of political discourse. These large number of concordances displaying the patterns of professional translation can be used as teaching materials and help the translator trainees better understand the ways that Chinese political texts are translated. It also is of practical significance because it reveals the factors that influence the Chinese-English translation of political discourse, which sheds a new light on the publicity of a country and its policies worldwide.

1.4 Structure of the Book The book consists of six chapters. We present in this chapter a general introduction of this book. By presenting the rationale of this study, we specifically illustrate the 3 We

group China into the Self-category and all the other countries into the Other-category.

8

1 Introduction

objectives of this study and the research questions this book is to address. We also show to the readers in this chapter why it is important and of interest to examine evaluation in translation and thus provide a general research background for the following chapters. We provide in Chapter 2 a critical review of the previous studies in related fields to lay a solid theoretical foundation for this book. Cross-disciplinary as it is, this study mainly involves a corpus-based discourse analysis of the English translation of Chinese political discourse. We thus focus our reviews on previous studies on CTS, the translation of political discourse with a particular attention to the English translation of Chinese political discourse. We also take into account for critical review Appraisal System in discourse analysis and its application in Translation Studies. By doing so, we identify the limitations of the previous studies and the research gaps our study departs from. In Chapter 3, we provide the theoretical framework and methodology of this study. To make an original contribution to the literature on evaluation in translation, we draw on a corpus-based discourse analysis approach and a combined framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model. We also provide a detailed description of research methodology, covering research approaches, corpus design and processing, the research procedure of data collection and analysis. Apart from that, we give a clear explanation of the ways how the combined framework and methodology support the investigation of the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in the Chinese-English translation of political discourse and how they help answer the research questions formulated in this chapter. In Chapter 4, we deal with the features of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse and the English translation of them that are sampled under investigation. Specifically, we offer a general picture of the distribution and the frequency of the appraisal epithets in each sub-category of Appraisal System and in both the Self- and the Other-categories in Chinese political discourse, the English translation of the appraisal epithets with respect to different translation strategies adopted for them in each sub-category of Appraisal System and in both the Self- and the Other-categories. It is noted that the polarity of the collocates of these sampled appraisal epithets have been taken into account in the categorisations. Chapter 5 is the most important part of our study and is concerned with the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse and the variations of stance towards China and other countries. We present in this chapter the results generated from the Chinese-English parallel corpus of political discourse and on the basis of the statistical analyses in line with the research questions. We also provide further discussions on the findings related to the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets and the variations of stance from three perspectives, i.e., language differences between Chinese and English, the General Strategy of Politeness, and the ideological factors in translation. Based on our discussion, we also proposed a revised Ideological Square Model that offers more reasoning explanation. The five research questions are revisited and answered in this chapter.

1.4 Structure of the Book

9

Chapter 6 is the conclusive part where we display to the readers our findings, the lessons that can be learnt from this empirical study. More importantly, we also offer some suggestions for further studies on evaluation in translation.

References Adendorff, Ralph, Vivian De Klerk, and Desiree Van Genechten. 2009. “The expression of AFFECT in discussions about HIV/AIDS.” Text & Talk-An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse Communication Studies 29 (2): 125–149. Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, and Tony McEnery. 2013. Discourse analysis and media attitudes: The representation of Islam in the British press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baker, Paul, Gavin Brookes, and Craig Evans. 2019. The language of patient feedback: A corpus linguistic study of online health communication. London: Routledge. Bednarek, Monika 2006. Evaluation in media discourse. Analysis of a newspaper corpus. London and New York: Continuum. Bednarek, Monika, and Helen Caple. 2010. “Playing with environmental stories in the news—Good or bad practice?” Discourse & Communication 4 (1): 5–31. Bednarek, Monika. 2008. Emotion talk across corpora. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Berk, Lynn M. 1999. English syntax: From word to discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, Edward Finegan, and Randolph Quirk. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Vol. 2. Essex: Pearson Education Ltd. Cedroni, Lorella. 2013. “Politolinguistics: Towards a new analysis of political discourse.” In Multimodal communication in political speech: Shaping minds and social action, edited by Isabella Poggi, Francesca D’Errico, Laura Vincze and Alessandro Vinciarelli. Heidelberg: Springer. Cheng, Zhen Qiu [程镇球]. 2003. “Political awareness in the translation of political articles [政治 文章的翻译要讲政治].” Chinese Translators Journal [中国翻译] (03): 20–24. Chilton, Paul. 2004. Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. London: Routledge. Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and power. London: Longman. Gallardo, Susana, and Laura Ferrari. 2010. “How doctors view their health and professional practice: An appraisal analysis of medical discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (12): 3172–3187. Geng, Yifan, and Sue Wharton. 2016. “Evaluative language in discussion sections of doctoral theses: Similarities and differences between L1 Chinese and L1 English writers.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 22: 80–91. Halliday, Michael, and Christian Matthiessen. 2014. An introduction to functional grammar. London: Routledge. Halliday, Michael. 1994. An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold. Hommerberg, Charlotte, and Alexanne Don. 2015. “Appraisal and the language of wine appreciation: A critical discussion of the potential of the Appraisal framework as a tool to analyse specialised genres.” Functions of Language 22 (2):161–191. Hood, Susan, and James Martin. 2010. “Invoking attitude: The play of graduation in appraising discourse.” In Collected works of J. R. Martin (Vol. 2), edited by Zhen Hua Wang, 376–400. Shanghai: Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Hood, Susan. 2010. Appraising research: Evaluation in academic writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan. House, Juliane. 2008. “Beyond intervention: Universals in translation?” Trans-kom 1 (1): 6–19. Huan, Chang Peng. 2016. “Journalistic engagement patterns and power relations: Corpus evidence from Chinese and Australian hard news reporting.” Discourse & Communication 10 (2): 137–156.

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Huang, Xiao Cong. 2013. “Transitivity in English—Chinese literary translation: The case of James Joyce’s “Two Gallants”.” Babel 59 (1): 93–109. Huang, You Yi [黄友义]. 2004. “Sticking to the ‘Three Approachings’ principle for international publicity to deal with translation DIFFICULTIES [坚持”外宣三贴近”原则,处理好外宣翻译中 的难点问题].” Chinese Translators Journal [中国翻译] (6): 27–28. Hunston, Susan, and Geoffrey Thompson. 2000. Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kakti¸nš, Louise. 2014. “Appraising plagiarism policies of Australian universities.” Text & Talk 34 (2): 117–141. Kaltenbacher, Martin. 2007. “Systemic functional linguistics and corpus analysis: the language of exaggeration in web-sites of tourism.” In Empirical Approaches to Discourse, edited by Martin Kaltenbacher and Peter Muntigl, 89–117. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Kim, Mira. 2007. “Using systemic functional text analysis for translator education: An illustration with a focus on textual meaning.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 1 (2): 223–246. Love, Kristina. 2006. “APPRAISAL in online discussions of literary texts.” Text & Talk-An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse Communication Studies 26 (2): 217–244. Martin, James Robert, and David Rose. 2003. Working with discourse: Meaning beyond the clause. London: Continuum. Martin, James Robert, and Peter White. 2005. The language of evaluation: appraisal in English. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, James Robert. 1992. English text: System and structure. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Martin, James Robert. 2000. “Beyond exchange: Appraisal systems in English.” In Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse, edited by Susan Hunston and Geoff Thompson, 142–175. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, Donna. 2006. “From concordance to text: Appraising ‘giving’in Alma Mater donation requests.” In System and corpus: Exploring connections, edited by Geoff Thompson and Susan Hunston, 248–268. London: Equinox Publishing. Munday, Jeremy. 2012a. Evaluation in translation: Critical points of translator decision-making. London: Routledge. Munday, Jeremy. 2012b. “New directions in discourse analysis for translation: a study of decisionmaking in crowdsourced subtitles of Obama’s 2012 State of the Union speech.” Language and Intercultural Communication 12 (4): 321–334. Myskow, Gordon. 2018. “Changes in attitude: Evaluative language in secondary school and university history textbooks.” Linguistics and Education 43: 53–63. Okulska, Urszula, and Piotr Cap, eds. 2010. Perspectives in politics and discourse. Vol. 36. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Page, Ruth E. 2003. “An analysis of APPRAISAL in childbirth narratives with special consideration of gender and storytelling style.” TEXT-THE HAGUE THEN AMSTERDAM THEN BERLIN 23 (2): 211–238. Pounds, Gabrina. 2011. ““This property offers much character and charm”: evaluation in the discourse of online property advertising.” Text & Talk-An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies 31 (2): 195–220. Qian, Hong [钱宏]. 2007. “Investigating unfaithful translations via the appraisal theory——A case study on perfume ads translation [运用评价理论解释“不忠实”的翻译现象——香水广告翻译 个案研究].” Journal of Foreign Languages [外国语(上海外国语大学学报)] (06): 57–63. Sheldon, Elena. 2018. “Dialogic spaces of knowledge construction in research article Conclusion sections written by English L1, English L2 and Spanish L1 writers.” Ibérica 35: 13–40. Souza, Ladjane Maria Farias de. 2010. “Interlingual re-instantiation: A model for a new and more comprehensive systemic functional perspective on translation.” Doctor of Philosophy, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina and University of Sydney. Stubbs, Michael. 1996. Text and corpus analysis: Computer-assisted studies of language and culture. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Stubbs, Michael. 1997. “Whorf’s children: Critical comments on critical discourse analysis.” In Evolving models of language, edited by Ann Ryan and Alison Wray, 100–116. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Stubbs, Michael. 2001. Words and phrases: Corpus studies of lexical semantics. Oxford: Blackwell. Thompson, Geof, and Susan Hunston. 2006. “Evaluation in text.” In Encyclopedia of language & linguistics, edited by Keith Brown, 305–312. Oxford: Elsevier. Unsworth, Len. 2015. “Persuasive narratives: Evaluative images in picture books and animated movies.” Visual communication 14 (1): 73–96. van Dijk, Teun A. 1998. Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage. Vološinov, Valentin Nikolaevich. 1973. Marxism and the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wang, Ping Xing [王平兴]. 2011. “Rethinking of ‘redundant shifts’ in Chinese-English translation [关于汉英翻译“迁移性冗余”的一些思考].” Chinese Translators Journal [中国翻译] (5): 79– 83. Wang, Zhen Hua [王振华]. 2001. “APPRAISAL systems and their operation: A new development in the systemic functional linguistics [评价系统及其运作——系统功能语言学的新发 展].” Journal of Foreign Languages [外国语(上海外国语大学学报)] (06): 13–20. White, Peter RR. 2012. “Exploring the axiological workings of ‘reporter voice’news stories— Attribution and attitudinal positioning.” Discourse, Context & Media 1 (2): 57–67. Widdowson, Henry. 2004. Text, context, pretext: Critical issues in critical discourse analysis. Oxford: Blackwell. Wu, Guang Jun [武光军]. 2010. “Redundant shifts in the English translation of the 2010 Report on the work of the government: Analysis and solutions [2010年政府工作报告英译本中的迁移性 冗余: 分析与对策].” Chinese Translators Journal [中国翻译] (6): 64–68. Xiao, Richard. 2010. “How different is translated Chinese from native Chinese? A corpus-based study of translation universals.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15 (1): 5–35. Zhang, Mei Fang [张美芳]. 2002. “Appraisal and the translator’s attitude [语言的评价意义与译 者的价值取向].” Foreign Languages and Their Teaching [外语与外语教学] (07): 15–18.

Chapter 2

Corpus-Based Translation Studies and Political Discourse Analysis

In this chapter, we provide a critical review of the previous studies in related fields. Rooted in CTS and cross-disciplinary as it is, this study adopts a corpus-based discourse analysis approach to examine the English translation of Chinese political discourse. We thus focus on first CTS, particularly CTS in the Chinese context and then the translation of political discourse with an emphasis on the English translation of Chinese political discourse. We also reviewed the application of Appraisal System, an analytical framework for this study, in discourse analysis and Translation Studies. To do so, we identify the limitations of the previous studies and the research gaps our study fills in.

2.1 Review of Corpus-Based Translation Studies 2.1.1 CTS in General It has been more than two decades since the proposal to apply corpus in Translation Studies, anticipating that the availability of corpora and corpus-driven methodology would enable us to identify features of translated text as a mediated communicative event and to help us understand what translation is and how it works (Baker 1993: 242–243). As Hu (2011: 3–7) points out, CTS embeds its origin in Corpus Linguistics and Descriptive Translation Studies. On the basis of these two disciplines, CTS adopts a comparative research model in which a descriptive hypothesis about the probabilistic generality of a given phenomenon is put forward, and texts are examined across corpora representing different language varieties, translated versus non-translated languages, original texts and their translations, different text types or different modalities within the same language, and so on (Laviosa 2004). CTS has now become “a coherent, composite and rich paradigm that addresses a variety of issues pertaining to theory, description, and the practice of translation” (Laviosa 1998). © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Li and K. Hu, Reappraising Self and Others, Corpora and Intercultural Studies 6, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9488-5_2

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In CTS, two types of corpora have been largely employed: comparable corpus and parallel corpus. A comparable corpus is composed of “two separate collections of texts in the same language: one corpus consisting of original texts in the language in question and the other consisting of translations into that language from a given source language or languages” (Baker 1995). This type of corpus is particularly useful to examine translation universals and the specific features of translation (e.g., Kruger 2012; Laviosa-Braithwaite 1996, 1997; Zanettin 1998). However, although Baker (1995) mentions that the sub-corpus of original texts and the sub-corpus of translation should cover a similar domain, time span, and variety of language, a comparable corpus does not contain the source texts (hereafter the STs) of the translation, which means the interference of SL is ignored1 and the comparability of the two sub-corpora is also challenged (McEnery and Xiao 2007; Olohan 2004: 39). When it comes to a parallel corpus, it “consists of texts originally written in a language A alongside their translations into a language B” (Kenny 2001: 51). While a study based on a comparable corpus compares the translated language with the comparable original language to uncover linguistic patterns especially featured in translations, a study based on a parallel corpus approach compares the SL and the TL to determine the extent to which the features of translated texts overlap with, or are deviated from, those of the SL. Parallel corpora thus are particularly used to identify specific translational behaviours in language pair translations, for example, to investigate translation shifts at a lexical or a syntactical level. Generally, alignment techniques and software packages, often together with manual proofreading, are used to establish equivalent relationships between the STs and the target texts at the sentence level. A great number of studies have been devoted to CTS to date, and there is a large body of literature in this field, which involves languages ranging from English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish, Chinese, Arabic, Persian, to Afrikaans; the genres that have been covered include literacy texts, political discourse, academic discourse, business texts, to name just a few. Some of the main issues discussed in CTS include translation universal (e.g., Baker 1995; Becher 2011; Chesterman 2004; Grabowski 2013; Krogsgaard Vesterager 2017; Kruger 2012), linguistic patterns in specific language pairs (e.g., Araújo 2004; Becher 2011; Cappelle and Loock 2013; Laviosa 1998; Marais and Naudé 2007; Kenny 1998; Ramón 2009), translational norm (e.g., Felici and Pal 2012; Južniˇc 2013; Kenny 2001), translator’s style (e.g., Baker 1999, 2000; Malmkjær 2004; Olohan 2004), translator and interpreter training (e.g., Bennett 2013; Espunya 2014; Leppihalme 2013; Nebot 2008; Zanettin 1998). What makes CTS different from traditional paradigms in Translation Studies lies in the following three aspects. Firstly, as is inherited from Corpus Linguistics and Descriptive Translation Studies, CTS lays emphasis on the investigation 1 As

is also implied in Baker (1993: 245, 1995), Li and Chen (2015) argues that comparable corpus contains translations from not just one language but many languages, which means that Translational English Corpus has already filtered the influence of SL(s). This is to some degree validated by Mauranen (2004), where the different degree of SL interference between translations from one SL and translations from multi-SLs is discussed.

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of authentic translated texts rather than imagined or invented examples of translation. Secondly, CTS regards translated texts as the results of probabilistic patterns of translation behaviours, which to some extent makes the research findings away from personal biased judgements. And the replication of the corpus-based analysis makes the research more scientific and the results more reliable. Thirdly, CTS helps uncover the unidentified linguistic patterns particularly in translated texts, which are often hidden and separated from manual examination, and helps validate or refuse translation hypotheses usually proposed by previous studies.

2.1.2 CTS in the Chinese Context CTS has received an increasing attention in the last two decades in China. Especially after the new millennium, there have been a huge number of articles and quite a few monographs produced in CTS.2 This section offers a critical review of CTS in the Chinese context in terms of translation-oriented corpus compilation, translation universals, linguistic patterns in the Chinese-English language pair, translational norm, translator’s style, and interpreting. These previous studies have laid a strong foundation for the design of our research.

2.1.2.1

Translation-Oriented Corpus Compilation and Processing

Corpus is the basis for CTS and the building of translation-oriented corpus is the precondition. Many translation-oriented corpora have been compiled and been used in Translation Studies in China, particularly after 2000. Some software packages have also been developed to deal with the Chinese language, for example, ICTCLAS, the word-segmenting and POS tagging software, which is widely used in CTS in the Chinese context. Wang (2004) reports the compilation of a general Chinese-English bidirectional parallel corpus (CEPC), which was the largest one of that kind ever built in the world by 2004. It is built with an aim to conduct translation studies, contrastive analysis, research on language teaching, and dictionary-making. This parallel corpus, with a size of about 30 million Chinese characters and English words marked up in the XML format, consists of several sub-parallel corpora: a sub-parallel corpus of Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation with literary texts as the main source of data, a sub-parallel corpus of encyclopaedic data, a sub-parallel corpus of specialised data, and a sub-corpus of parallel data from textbooks, dictionaries, and data of all different types. And all these data are categorised into two groups: literary 2 In

addition to many articles related CTS in the Chinese context that have been published in English journals, a quick research with “corpus” plus “translation” as search items in CNKI, the largest database for research scholars which covers more than 7,900 journals and nearly all PhD theses and MA dissertations in China, returns 4,319 journal articles, 232 PhD theses and 1753 MA dissertations on December 31st, 2019.

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texts and non-literary texts. All the texts in the corpus are POS tagged and aligned at the sentence level, and all these texts are marked with very helpful meta-data, for example, text type, the time when the texts were produced or published, author, translator, and publisher. This pioneering parallel corpus in China has supported quite a number of translation studies presented in articles and books (see for example, Qin and Wang 2009; Wang and Hu 2008; Wang and Qin 2014), which largely promotes the development of CTS in the Chinese context. Hu (2006) presents the compilation of a translational Chinese corpus called the Contemporary Chinese Translated Fiction Corpus (CCTFC) in order to examine translational norms found in Chinese translated fictions. This corpus with a size of 1.3 million characters contains sampled data from fifty-six Chinese translated novels from multi SLs, for example, English, French, Russian, German, Japanese, Spanish, covering the time span from 1980 to 2000. In order to compare translated Chinese with original Chinese, the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese built by Tony McEnery and Richard Zhonghua Xiao is adopted as a reference corpus to make it a comparable corpus-based translation study. The Contemporary Chinese Translated Fiction Corpus has also encouraged many other translation studies in China (Hu 2007; Hu and Zeng 2009, 2010). Fair to say, this is the earliest, if not the only one, Chinese counterpart of The Translational English Corpus built by the Mona Baker, the leading pioneer of CTS, and used to study translation universal. Liu et al. (2008) discuss the difficulties and solutions involved in the compilation of a Chinese-English parallel corpus of Chinese classic A Dream of Red Mansions. This parallel corpus contains one ST of A Dream of Red Mansions and its three English translations with each of them as an individual sub-corpus, and thus three sub-parallel corpora are built. All the texts are tagged with a few marks like register, voice, rhetoric, and sentence mode. This corpus can be used to compare the ST with any one of the three translations, or contrast the three translations to examine the translation differences and translational styles. Some of the studies that use this corpus include Liu (2010), Liu et al. (2011), Liu and Tian (2009), Liu and Yan (2010), and Hou (2013). This is one of the first Chinese-English parallel corpora of literary texts. Hu and Zou (2009) provides an in-depth discussion of the procedures of the English-Chinese parallel corpus of Shakespeare’s plays. The parallel corpus they built contains sub-parallel corpora in relation to the English versions of Shakespeare’s plays and their three Chinese translations published in different times. All the texts in this corpus are aligned in terms of monologue or dialogue, considering the features of plays. Since this corpus was built to allow studies of translation universals, representation of interpersonal meaning, and translation shifts, much research has been achieved based on this parallel corpus (e.g., Hu and Zhu 2008; Hu 2009, 2011, 2015; Li 2011; Liu and Hu 2014; Meng and Hu 2015; Hu and Cui 2016). This corpus is one of the first English-Chinese parallel corpus building projects. Xiao (2010) introduces the compilation of the Zhejiang University Corpus of Translational Chinese (ZCTC) which is built to identify the distinctive features of translated Chinese. As a one-million-word balanced translational corpus designed to

2.1 Review of Corpus-Based Translation Studies

17

represent translated Chinese, it, like Brown corpus family, has five hundred 2,000word sample texts taken from fifteen written-text types published in Chinese. Each of the 500 files has both a corpus header which displays meta-data information such as translator, authors, and publisher, and a body in which all texts data are segmented and POS tagged. This corpus also has grounded many translation studies (Dai and Xiao 2011; Xiao 2010, 2011; Xiao and Dai 2010, 2014). Hu and Tao (2010) reports the compilation and application of the Chinese-English Conference Interpreting Corpus (CECIC), which involves a complicated and timeconsuming task, including transcribing, parsing, tagging, annotating and aligning large amount of Chinese and English texts. It consists of three separate sub-corpora: the sub-parallel corpus of press conference Chinese-English interpreting (262,039 Chinese characters; 189,743 English words); the sub-parallel corpus of ChineseEnglish translation of government reports (265,460 Chinese characters; 200,509 English words), and an original English corpus of press conference (220,336 English words). Using this corpus, quite a few studies have been carried out to examine translation universals (Hu and Tao 2009), translational norm (Hu and Tao 2012), translation shifts (Li and Hu 2015; Pan and Hu 2013), and translation of interpersonal meaning (Li and Hu 2013; Li and Hu 2015). This corpus is the pioneering interpreting corpus in the Chinese context that is really applied in translation studies. Some other parallel corpora have also been constructed specially for the purpose of translation teaching. For example, Zhu and Yip (2010) presents a report on the construction of ClinkNotes, a programme which accommodates parallel corpora of English and Chinese, for teaching of translation or bilingual training in a context of large-scale class. Zhang (2015b) shows the tagging of the paralinguistic features of the Chinese Interpreting Learners Corpus. Many more corpora of different genre, of other types, and of Chinese and other language pairs have also been compiled for the study of translation after CTS has been introduced to China. For example, two comparable corpora consisting of the sub-corpus of English-Chinese translated news articles and the sub-corpus of non-translated Chinese news articles (Zhu and Hu 2014); Multiple (Learner) Translation Corpora (Li and Chen 2015), a special English-Chinese parallel corpus with one ST and multiple TTs; A 20 million sized Chinese-Japanese parallel corpus (Cao 2006); a Chinese-Russian parallel corpus (Cui and Zhang 2014).

2.1.2.2

Studies of Translation Universals in the Chinese Context

As a new concept in translation studies that was introduced from western academia, translation universal(s) has been widely validated or falsified in the Chinese CTS scholarly field after many translation-oriented corpora have been complied.3 3 Compared

with traditional paradigms, CTS has become a new direction of Chinese translation studies. According to a survey by Zhang (2015a), the National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences of China has funded 360 translation studies projects (including 195 projects for practical translation of philosophy and social science research in Chinese into other languages) from 2000

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However, among translation universals, explicitation, simplification, and normalisation have been more frequently discussed. Some of the studies on explicitation include Dai and Xiao (2011), Hu and Zhu (2008), Hu and Tao (2009), Huang (2008), Hu and Zeng (2009), Ke (2005), Qin and Wang (2009), Xiao (2010); studies on simplification include Qin and Wang (2009), Hu (2010); and those on normalisation include Hu and Zeng (2010), Xiao and Dai (2010), Dai and Xiao (2011). There are also some few studies on untypical collocation (Wu and Wang 2011), SL Shiningthrough hypothesis (Dai 2013; Li and Chen 2015). These studies have promoted the academic status of CTS as a sub-discipline in Translation Studies. Some other translation universals have also been proposed in the Chinese context. Qin and Wang (2009) argues that many typical translated Chinese patterns, due to the SL interference, tend to function as formulaic expressions to translate certain phrases or syntactical structures with similar meaning in the STs, as in the case of “As time goes on” which tends to be translated into “随着时间的推移”. After analysing translation shifts of adverbs in Chinese-English interpreting of political discourse, Hu and Tao (2012) proposes a translation universal of meaning intensifying or meaning softening effect, arguing that interpreters tend to intensify or soften the original meaning of adverbs. The meaning intensifying effect is displayed by adding the modifying degree of adverbs when there is no adverb in the original text or an adverb of lower degree is replaced with a higher degree adverb, and the meaning softening effect works just the opposite. This meaning intensifying and softening effect has also been identified in the Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s plays (Liu and Hu 2014). Regarding measurements of translation universal, Qin (2010) proposes a concept of “Construction’s Load Capacity” and argues that a simplistic sentence length calculation is less reliable then sentence segment length or the construction’s load capacity to identify the salient features of translated Chinese. Given the special features of Chinese syntax, it is suggested to incorporate the construction’s load capacity in the framework of CTS in the Chinese context. However, many questions about translation universal still remain to be answered. For example, translation universal contradicts the concept of law of interference (Toury 1995: 275), since it is defined as the features of translated texts which “typically occur in translated text rather than original utterance and which are not the result of interference from specific linguistic system” (Baker 1993: 243). As Li and Chen (2015) points out, the adaptation of corpora of different types and different research methods cannot assure a valid hypothesis testing to echo the previous translation universal(s) studies. After more than 20 years of development, it is theoretical urgent to reshape the concepts of those specific translation universal(s) and corresponding methodology.

to 2013, among which apparent CTS projects are more than 20. Zhang (2015a) argues that there is an obvious increase in CTS that has become an important topic in translation studies in recent years in China.

2.1 Review of Corpus-Based Translation Studies

2.1.2.3

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Linguistic Patterns in the Chinese-English Language Pair

Studies on linguistic patterns identified in the Chinese and English language pair attract much attention in the Chinese CTS field. Some of the most intensively studied lexical items include connectives (e.g., Xu and Zhang 2006; Xiao and Dai 2010; Xu 2010; Hu and Tao 2012; Xia 2013), pronouns (e.g., Huang 2008, 2011; Qin and Wang 2009; Wang and Hu 2010) and at the sentence level, syntactic patterns with “Bei”4 (e.g., Hu and Tao 2010; Hu and Zeng 2010; Zhu and Hu 2014; Xiao 2010; Xiao and Dai 2014), and “Ba”5 (e.g., Hu 2009, 2011; Hu and Zeng 2011; Xiao and Dai 2014) have been mostly explored. Hu (2010) carries out a multidimensional analysis of the features of translated Chinese based on the comparable corpora of translated Chinese and original Chinese. With more than thirty linguistic factors including pronouns, connectives, and “Bei”, two factors, as the findings reveal, can distinguish literary texts from nonliterary ones, and translated texts from original ones. The result shows that the most typical features in translated Chinese include general tendency towards grammatical explicitation; higher frequencies of auxiliaries, prepositions and pronouns; higher frequencies of unique items in Chinese such as the syntactic patterns of “Ba” and “Bei”. With a purpose to explore the semantic change of the syntactic pattern of “Bei” in translated Chinese, Zhu and Hu (2014) conduct a systematic comparison of the semantic preference and the semantic prosody of “Bei” pattern in two comparable corpora consisting of a corpus of the English-Chinese translated news articles and a corpus of non-translated Chinese news articles. The result shows that “Bei” pattern is more frequently used in translated Chinese news and more often collocate with verbs. It is also showed that its semantic preference in translated news tends to be endowed with transitive meaning, and its semantic prosody tends to be neutral compared with a negative semantic prosody in original Chinese news. Zhu and Hu’s study is instructive to our study in this book that the collocation patterns of appraisal epithets have an effect on the representation of evaluation.

2.1.2.4

Corpus-Based Studies on Translational Norm

Though important, a corpus-based approach to translational norm has so far received rather scant attention, particularly in the Chinese context. Among those few studies on translational norm that have been carried out, Hu (2006), Wang (2012), and Hu and Tao (2012) are typically representative. Drawing on CCTFC, Hu (2006) examines operational norms in relation to both lexical and syntactical levels by comparing the lexical and the syntactical features

4被

in Chinese, a typical linguistic form indicating passive voice.

5 把 in Chinese, a syntactical pattern which puts object before verb to stress the manner or the result

of such act.

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between translated Chinese and original Chinese, illustrating in detail the relationships between operational norms and the linguistic features. This study makes a distinction between internal norm and external norm: The former refers to the norms established by professional authorities in translation circle while the later refers to expectation norms from the audience and the social institutions. Wang (2012) carries out a pioneering corpus-based study on interpreting norms through the analysis of the translational shifts identified in Chinese-English interpreting. The analysis shows that interpreters tend to add or elaborate more frequently than reduce and correct in their interpretations, and the average frequency of translation shifts is 3.9 per minute across the five interpreters’ interpreted texts under investigation. Based on these findings, the study summarises four typical norms of Chinese-English interpreting, namely, the norm of adequacy, of explicitation in logic relations, of specificity in information, and of explicitness in meaning. Using CECIC, Hu and Tao (2012) examines the syntactic operational norms in the Chinese-English interpreting of political discourse with a focus on the operational norms of interpreting conjunctions, compound sentences and adverb intensifiers. The analysis shows that the Chinese-English interpreting of political discourse is governed differently by the operational norms of explicitation, implicitation, complication, simplification, intensifying and softening, and that the norms of implicitation and intensifying have more impact on interpreting than on political translation. It is argued that linguistic differences between Chinese and English and the time constraint of the interpreting process are the factors to account for these operational norms. These studies, particularly the latter two in political discourse, are enlightening to our study in this book, but also raise questions about the translator’s role in the operation of translational norms in the process of translation in which the translators choose to or not to adhere to these norms, which represents his attitudes, positioning in translation.

2.1.2.5

Corpus-Based Studies on Translator’s Style

Echoing to the call from Baker (2000) for “comparing different translations of the same ST into the same target language, by different translators”, some corpus-based studies on translator’s style have been conducted in the Chinese context. Among others, D. F. Li et al. (2011), Liu et al. (2011), Wang and Li (2012) are typical studies in point. Li et al. (2011), with the help of a parallel corpus, compares two English translations of Chinese classic A Dream of Red Mansions, one translated by David Hawkes and John Minford and the other by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. The comparative analysis of the two translations show that Hawkes and Minford’s translation used more words than the Yangs, but the latter used a wider range of words and more shorter sentences on average. It is argued that this stylistic difference in the two versions can be attributed to the translator’s primary translation purpose and their choices of different translation strategies and methods, which were affected by the

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social, political, and ideological milieu in which they lived and worked. Similarly, Liu et al. (2011) present a corpus-based study on translator’s style by comparing four English versions of Honglongmeng [also known as A Dream of Red Mansions], where all the four English translations display salient translated features and narrative stylistic features and the four English versions also have their own unique styles. Wang and Li (2012) conducts a corpus-based study of two Chinese translations of Ulysses, which compares James Joyce’s Ulysses and its two Chinese translations by Qian Xiao and by Di Jin, and also compares Xiao’s translation and his Chinese writings as he is both a writer and a translator. The study shows that at the lexical level, Xiao tends to employ colloquialism compared with Jin’s translation, leaving some traces of lexical idiosyncrasy in his writing and translation, while on the syntactic level, Xiao tends to place adverbial clauses backwards in translation than in his Chinese writing, a feature that distinguishes the translated Chinese from non-translated original Chinese. It is argued that the fingerprints of the translator are left on the translated text both as a result of their linguistic idiosyncrasy and the interference and constraints from both SL and TL. However, comparing Howard Goldblatt’s translations of Chinese novels and those of Gladys Yang’s, Huang and Zhu (2012) points out that the measurement for translator’s style simply by standard type-token ratio and average sentence length in translated texts is not reliable or effective to distinguish one translator from another. Moreover, most studies on translator’s style have so far largely focused on individual translator while there has been so far little research in the style of a group of translators of political discourse as in-group professionals in top-rank institutions.

2.1.2.6

Corpus-Based Interpreting Studies

In contrast to corpus-based studies on written translation, corpus-based interpreting studies has so far received little attention in the Chinese context, largely due to the difficulty in the compilation of interpreting corpus. Nevertheless, some attempts to build interpreting corpora and corpus-based studies on the features of interpreted texts have occasionally been carried out. Using Hong Kong bilingual interpreting corpus on contemporary social life, Li and Wang (2012) investigates lexical features in interpreted texts. The analysis shows that, as compared with translational texts, the proportion of high frequent words outweighs that of words with low frequency and the lexical density is lower, and that the average word and sentence length and the degree of nominalisation are higher, suggesting a more formal, difficult, and objective style in interpreted texts. They argue that these findings can be accounted for by inherent differences between translation and interpreting, interpreters’ customised lexis and professional ethics. But similar to Wang (2012) discussed in 2.1.2.4, the size of the corpus used in this investigation is very small and less representative so that the findings cannot be generalised to other types of interpreting. In addition to Hu and Tao (2012), CECIC is also used in Li and Hu (2013), a study that examines the use of modal verbs in interpreting. The analysis reveals that,

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compared with the original English speech during US government press conference, the Chinese-English interpreting of political discourse displays an overuse of strong modals (will, shall, should, and must) and an underuse of weak ones (would, might and could). It is also found that the contracted forms of will (’ll) and would (’d) are strikingly underused in interpreting. It is argued that the distinctive patterns of modal verbs in Chinese-English interpreting are mainly due to the tenor difference between Chinese and US political discourse, the implicate nature of Chinese language, and the interpreter’s subjectivity. Similar use of CECIC in the analysis of Chinese interpreted texts can also be found in Pan and Hu (2013), Xie and Hu (2015), Li and Hu (2015), and Li (2018).

2.1.2.7

Corpus-Based Critical Translation Studies

Since Baker’s seminal paper that proposes the application of corpus in translation studies, CTS has become an important sub-discipline of Translation Studies. However, most previous CTS focus on translated language itself and make little efforts on the investigation of the interplay between translated texts and the sociocultural context where translated texts have been produced. Even some studies probe into the external factors influencing the production of translation, translation is still considered in these studies as a passive, external factor influenced by-product (e.g., Gao 2015). Hu (2012) proposes Corpus-based Critical Translation Studies that adopts a corpus-based critical discourse analysis approach to Translation Studies, focusing on the interplay between translation and ideology, and between translation strategies, skills used in translation and power relations among translation participants. This trend in CTS is based on the concept that translation is not a mere by-product of other social activities, but an active force in the creation and construction of a society. So it is suggested that by the examination of the linguistic patterns in a translationoriented corpus, more attention should be paid to the investigation of the ideology and the power relations behind the translation products and the choices made in the translation process. Drawing on corpus-based methodology and critical discourse analysis, Kim (2013) examines US news stories and their Korean translated news in South Korean with a view to identifying specific discursive practices relating to North Korea and the way in which North Korea news are mediated in translation. The results show that US news consistently attempt to associate North Korea with Iran, and repeatedly construct them as threats to world peace while the Korean TTs translated by Newsweek Hangukpan tend to focus more heavily than those selected by CNN Hangeul News on North Korea’s nuclear activities. It is also found that North Korea, both in the English corpus and the English ST sub-corpus, was projected as a voiceless party subjected to a “judicial” process in which the United States acts as a judge and pronounces on its [North Korea’s] “suspicious” acts, yet in the Korean TTs, North Korea appears to exert some control in a process of “negotiation” with the United States and it is perceived by a South Korean audience as a country in “dire

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need of humanitarian help” rather than an “enemy” who consistently carries out a series of provocative acts against South Korea. By relocating translation into the larger socialcultural context, Kim argues that the translation shifts would be partly the result of adopting general Korean journalistic norms, or part of a process of recontextualisation, whereby a text is rewritten in subtle ways in order to promote a particular view of the world. This project is one of the earliest studies that draw on corpus-based discourse analysis approach to translation studies and thus provides valuable insights in terms of methodological issues. Specifically, it takes translation as discourse practice and adopts corpus-based approach to identify the discursive patterns rather than several pieces of examples that biasedly suits the research needs. Li (2013) draws on a corpus of five sets of Chinese political speeches and their English translations delivered by the state leaders in each of their periods of leadership and attempts to investigate the process of political translation in China and the textual products from the perspective of a combined CDA model of Fairclough and van Dijk. It sets out to argue that the translation of Chinese political discourse is both an institutional operation and a reciprocal process of norm-reformation practice. The study concludes that the roles translation plays in mediating between the source and target societies manifest themselves as power-mediated knowledge transfer between the source culture and the target culture depending on which culture holds more discursive power in specific context models. It is observed that translation, as a form of political engagement in an era when China is governed under a more open and settled leadership, demonstrates a growing tendency to interact with the target readership and engages in the negotiation with the orthodox norms. Li’s research proposes a combined CDA model that lays emphasis on both textual analysis at micro-level for the close examination of texts and a macro-level perspective to account for the core relation between power enactment and discourse production. This corpus-based critical discourse analysis of Chinese-English translation is insightful to our study in terms of both methodology and materials under investigation. Li and Xu (2018) presents a corpus-based discourse analysis of the English translation of the evaluative epithets in Graduation—one sub-category of Appraisal System—in Chinese political discourse to examine translators’ mediation of the attitudes towards China and other countries. The findings show that the translators of Chinese political discourse used different translation strategies to deal with evaluative epithets that modify China and other countries and their mediations of attitudes result in a discursive pattern that attitude towards China becomes less positive while attitude towards other countries less negative in the translation of political discourse from Chinese into English. They argue that the results are partially due to the translation participants’ adherence to politeness principles and ideologically to serve China’s interests. This paper is closely related to our study in this book. However, Appraisal System is a holistic framework, which means all sub-categories in the system have to be taken into account when applying it to discourse analysis. An investigation of one-sub-category without considering other sub-categories is not enough and thus requires more studies for further justification. As a series of studies, Gu (2018, 2019a, 2019b) adopt a corpus-based CDA approach to examine different aspects of the interpreting of Chinese Premier’s

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press conferences and reveal the interpreters’ mediation and the hidden ideology in the interpreter-mediated discursive events that facilitate the articulation of China’s discourse to international audiences. Gu (2018) draws on a corpus-based CDA approach to explore the ways in which China’s discourse on its past actions and accomplishments is mediated by the Chinese government-affiliated interpreters in the interpreted English. By close reading of the concordance lines containing the top three self-referential items (we/ China/ government) and critical comparisons with the Chinese originals, the study finds that the interpreters’ proliferated use of present perfect (continuous) structures is established as a prominent feature in (re)presenting Beijing’s achievements in English, which discursively leads to a stronger level of accomplishment, positive self -portrayal and, resultantly, political legitimisation. Using Bakhtin’s notion of dialogised heteroglossia, Gu (2019a) carries out a corpusbased analysis of the dynamic and interactive setting of the interpreted-mediated Chinese Premier’s press conferences, where there is often a centripetal force pulling towards Beijing’s official positions and stances (the central, unitary and authoritative) and simultaneously a centrifugal force exerted by (foreign) journalists who pose sensitive and adversarial questions. It is found that the government-affiliated interpreters, as additional subjective actors in the triadic communication process, tend more often than not to align with the government’s official positions, soften the journalists’ challenging questions and (re)construct a more desirable image for Beijing. Gu (2019b) reports a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of government interpreters’ mediation of China’s discourse on PEOPLE at Chinese Premier’s press conferences. The results show that the interpreters mediated to reinforce China’s discourse on PEOPLE-related items and (re)construct a more positive image of China being people-oriented and concerned with its people in the English translation (e.g., the repeated use of “our people”). This article highlights the government interpreters’ prominent role in image representation and in contributing to the government’s political legitimation and hegemonic rule. These interpreting studies drawing on corpusbased CDA approach focus on different ideology-loaded linguistic items as entries of investigation of the interpreters’ mediation in the Chinese-English interpreting and provide useful insights, though in different translation forms, to our corpus-based discourse analysis of the English translation of chinse political discourse. Translation is never neutral. The combination of corpus-based method and (critical) discourse analysis approach helps to identify the patterns of translation shifts due to translator’s mediation and reveal the unbalanced power relations involved in translation process. In this sense, this corpus-based discourse analysis approach to Translation Studies has recently become a new methodological direction for Translation Studies.

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2.2 Political Discourse Analysis 2.2.1 Political Discourse in General Political discourse in this study refers to the “institution political discourse” (Chilton 2004: 72), including official documents, political speeches, press conferences, that expresses the policies, attitudes, stances of a government or a country. The importance of language in politics has never been neglected. As Romagnuolo (2009) describes, “language is used to formulate policies (including language policies), create alliances, shape and disseminate values that define political associations, establish legal systems, and identify forms of government”. “The political language is the language of power, … a contractual interaction that can determine cooperation or competition” (Cedroni 2013: 221). These remarks emphasise the interplay between language and politics, between political discourse and social realities. So the analysis of political discourse, in Okulska and Cap’s words, “does more than merely reflect events which take place in the world; it interprets these events and formulates understandings, thus contributing to the constitution of a new reality” (2010: 4). The past few decades have witnessed a growing wave of scholarship in the analysis of political discourse and a great number of articles and monographs have been published in this field, for example, the book series on Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture edited by Ruth Wodak and Greg Myers. Most research on political discourse is largely within the theoretical framework of CDA, which focuses on the interplay between language, power, ideology in a larger sociocultural context (e.g., Biria and Mohammadi 2012; Fairclough 2000; Flowerdew 2012; Hart 2013; Kangas 2014; van Dijk 2005, 2015; Wodak and Chilton 2005), and Systemic Functional Linguistics with an emphasis on the ways in which language realises existing social and cognitive structures (e.g., Dunmire 2005; Fenton-Smith 2007; Gales 2009; Martin and Wodak 2003; Vertommen 2013). The topics involved in political discourse analysis cover the relationship between politics, the government, and the media (e.g., Fairclough 2000; Fetzer and Weizman 2006; van Dijk 2010), ideology and political discourse (e.g., Al-Sharoufi 2011; Matu and Lubbe 2007; Moberg and Eriksson 2013; Krizsán 2013) and political language in general (e.g., Chilton 2004; Okulska and Cap 2010). All these studies have laid a solid foundation for further research on political discourse analysis. However, Discourse Analysis has been often under severe criticisms. One typical criticism is that critical discourse analysts often sample a limited number of texts subjectively and analyse linguistic features selectively in order to confirm their own political values, and thus can in no way avoid their own personal bias (e.g., Stubbs 1997; Widdowson 2004: 102). This criticism can be responded, as Chilton et al. (2010a) suggest, either with acknowledgement of the analysts’ normative position by arguing that no research is objective and all scientific research is always subservient to interests; or with studies relying on, instead of one or a few texts to illustrate their assumptions, a large collection of data.

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Corpus-based approach has recently been proposed to apply to discourse analysis. One of the advantages of corpus-based approach to discourse analysis, as Baker (2006: 10) argues, is that it can help reduce research bias because a large number of texts are investigated in the analysis. Hunston (2002: 109) argues that the techniques of corpus investigation have much to offer to discourse analysts to reveal ideology coded implicitly behind the overt propositions and challenge to represent the existing common sense in some other significant way. On a similar note, Baker (2006: 1) argues that corpus linguistics methodology can help “uncover linguistic patterns which can enable us to make sense of the ways that language is used in the construction of discourses (or ways of constructing reality)”. A number of studies that apply corpus-based approach to political discourse analysis have been conducted to date. Norman Fairclough, one of the leading scholars in the field of CDA, also adopted corpus-based methodology later in his analysis of political discourse. Drawing on a combined corpus-based approach and CDA, Fairclough (2000) carries out a comparative study of political discourse from a corpus of New Labour corpus and a corpus of earlier Labour Party documents in an attempt to identify changes in the ideology of the party through its language use. Through the detailed analysis of key words such as new, modernise, partnership, together, he argues that the Labour Party, through its public discourse, tries to remodel a new version of the Labour Party different from the Old Labour and calls for new approaches and attitudes to the new times which brings new opportunities and challenges. Piper (2000) demonstrates the ways in which a linguistic analysis of the dynamic relationship between a cultural keyword “life learning” and a particular socioeconomic model “human capital”. Based on a specialised corpus of recent British and EU literature on lifelong learning, Piper compares the collocation patterns, key features of the syntax and semantics of learning, individuals, people, and compares the linguistic patterns identified in the specialised corpus with those in general use. The results show that lifelong learning is most related to human capital particularly by its association with individuals and it is argued that the recurrent patterns in lifelong learning discourse are extending its linguistic categories into social categories as a socioeconomic activity. Using a corpus-assisted approach, McKenna and Waddell (2007) analyses a 32,000-word corpus of political statements made in response to the London bombing happened in July 2005. They examine the textual features and hermeneutically interpret their meaning within a wider context of international political discourse in order to explore the deontic nature of these statements. They argue that these political statements are relatively lack of condoling and did not, though condemnatory, specifically attribute the responsibility to particular people. It is concluded that the statements performed a positive epideictic purpose even though it tended to occlude the compassionate element of public grieving. Fetzer (2014) examines the distribution and function of the first-person-singular cognitive-verb-based syntagmatic configurations I think, I mean and I believe in the context of monologic and dialogic argumentative political discourse. It identifies discourse-domain-specific discourse patterns, which co-occur with other pragmatic

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markers and with expressions of modality and evidentiality. The results suggest that the local context of all of the three parentheticals shows a fine interplay of boosting and attenuating devices when they collocate with other expressions of vagueness or fuzziness, such as pronouns with an indeterminate domain of references, adverbials or generic nouns, and with less-fuzzy making devices. The results also indicate that the local context of the three parentheticals displays references to knowledge and memory in general, and to visual sources in particular. These previous studies have paved ways for further analysis of political discourse, particularly the corpus-based approach to political discourse analysis, which have demonstrated how corpus analysis can trace the discursive evidence of ideologies. And these studies have also offered enlightenment in one way or another to political discourse analysis in the Chinese context.

2.2.2 Political Discourse Analysis in the Chinese Context As Chilton et al. (2010b) “call the attention of discourse and language analysts to the challenging research tasks that the development of social, political and intellectual life in China is opening up”, some political discourse analyses in the Chinese context, though still an underexploited field, have been carried out. Taking a CDA perspective, Bhatia (2006) analyses the textual data from China–US presidential talks dating from 2001 to 2003 to communicate political differences in a positive way to smooth out sociopolitical and ideological discrepancies. The findings reveal that the discursive themes include the positivity for the reinforcement of mutual trust, respect and progress; the influence and power for subtle persuasion; and evasion to hedge or avoid responses to probing and inconvenient questions from the media. One thing worth mentioning is that the analysis is also validated with a corpus of secondary data consisting of statements, commentaries, news and views expressed in the media by spokespersons, associates, news reporters, political analysts, and academics, which are published in the contexts of the press conferences from a variety of media sources, has been considered. This triangulation proves useful in arriving at informed and reliable judgments about the interpretation of data from the press conference. Chen (2007) analyses the data transcribed from government press conference. The analysis shows that the control of ideology and power is not always singly from the political institutions or the power actors, but within a process of control and anticontrol between discourse participants; that the controller side is dynamic rather than stable; and that political discourse is not always discourse in which the power holders oppress the common. It is argued that the socio-cultural Chinese context restricts the exercise of ideology in political discourse, and that the control and anticontrol process is largely determined by the discursive purpose and strategy of the discourse participants. Huang and Chen (2009) also adopts a corpus-based approach to a diachronic analysis of the New Year’s editorials from 1949 to 2006 in the People’s Daily. These

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editorials have been roughly divided into three periods: 1949–1966, 1967–1978, 1979–2006. The analysis reveals that social relations between institutional authority as well as individual authority and the public have shifted from power asymmetry to solidarity to a large extent and the common national identity has been more prioritised so far. It is also found that social relations are also realised, besides addressing title, in evaluative linguistic resources, and that the resources representing social actions, such as deconstructive verbs and their nominalisations, have been on the sharp decrease in quantity. It is argued that some mainstream political ideologies still persist and are socially shared, but the social values have been pluralised as a result of the increasingly loosening and harmonious social context. One thing worthy of mention about this study is that it employs the analytical tool of Appraisal System to examine the social relationships between the discourse participants. As Huang’s study shows, the diachronic variation in the representation of evaluation lies in the decrease of negative resources of Judgment. The positive evaluation on the in-group social actors has been increasingly represented via indirect or implicit ways, i.e., through the positive appreciation resources. Drawing on CDA, Fairclough’s interactive perspective and van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach in particular, You (2010) carries out a diachronic analysis of government reports during the period of from 1993 to 2007 in an attempt to reveal how Chinese government produces its foreign policy through discourse and how government discourse and social changes interplay. Their findings show that all the reports are constructed with similar topics and schemata decided by orders of discourse; that the topical selection and schematic structure are ideological mechanisms for the government to manipulate power control over policy production and implementation; that the discourse is actually the final product of the struggle and interaction between new discourse and orders of discourse; and that the discourse is a reflection of social changes and works as a catalyst to shape people’s view towards social reality and to mold the social practice of China’s foreign policy production. Combining corpus linguistics methodology and CDA, Qian and Tian (2014) examines a corpus of Chinese government reports from 1999 to 2008 in attempt to identify the dialectical relationship between discourse and social change. By comparing the keyword lists and concordance lines of some key words generated from two subcorpora of government reports by two Premiers, i.e., Rongji Zhu and Jiabao Wen, the study shows that the foci represented in the government reports shape new discourse and in turn affect the recipients of the discourse and their actions, which embodies the interplay between government reports as institutional discourse and social changes. Li (2010) observes the ways in which social institutions, through their discursive practices, build the evolving social relations in contemporary China. The analysis of the data collected from interactions between citizens and government officials shows that institutional power is exercised and reinforced through a variety of discursive practices ranging from fixed procedures of questioning to speech acts of interrupting and blaming. It is argued that government agencies, as a force of social cohesion, need to transform dramatically their linguistic forms of interaction with society, the ideologies and practices associated with it.

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Tian and Chilton (2014) provides an in-depth discussion of theoretical and methodological issues concerning CDA in the Chinese context. It poses four issues relevant to a CDA approach to the sociopolitical transformations in China, namely, a wider angle of the critical perspective, a research focus on the functionality of discourse, the emergent public sphere, and the qualitative research method. It is suggested that the last two issues need to be given more attention because the new media has become a new platform for discourse analysis, and the qualitative research methodology needs to be given more weight in CDA-related social research in China. Contrasting with many West-centric perspectives for a consequent portrayal of deviant, totalitarian and unchanging ideology of the Communist Party of China (hereafter CPC) (e.g., Marinelli 2014), Shi (2011) conducts a critical discourse analysis of the texts on China’s human rights and argues for a historical and intercultural approach and a view of contemporary Chinese political discourse as dynamic, critical-creative and cultural-hegemony-resistant. Other topics such as identity, metaphor in Chinese political discourse have also been carried out. Drawing on CDA, Wang (2009) investigates the discursive construction of Hong Kong identity based on a comparative study between 11 annual policy addresses of the pre-transitional British Colonial Hong Kong Government during the period of 1986 to 1996 and the other 11 from the post-transitional Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region from the year 1997 to 2008. The result shows that both before and after the sovereignty transition Hong Kong remains a community with its own uniqueness, but the Chinese mainland was construed as out-group of Kong Hong before its sovereignty transition and in-group after the transition, and that the dynamic Hong Kong identities are subject to the relationship between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland. Kuo (2003), based on video-taped data from five televised 1998 Taipei mayoral debates, illustrates and discusses the use of animal metaphors in Chinese political discourse. The analysis shows that the debater, who resorts to the strategy of indirect metaphor, is able to create and maintain a positive public face while at the same time attack that of his political opponents. Together with corpus linguistics methodology, studies on political discourse in the Chinese context from a perspective of CDA help identify the underlying biased ideologies and power relations among the discourse participants. Although these previous studies have produced insightful findings and explanations that are enlightening to this book, some problems under the larger cover of political discourse analysis, however, have still not been sufficiently addressed, for example, political discourse across cultures.

2.2.3 Political Discourse in Translation Studies Similar to political discourse analysis, translation studies of political discourse have been greatly increasing in the last couple of decades. As Chilton (2004: xii) indicates, “during the course of our explorations we will come across the crucial question of discourse, and discourse analysis, across cultures, across languages and through

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translation”. Though much attention has been raised, a number of previous studies on political discourse as a genre in Translation Studies are largely limited to the topics like translation skills, strategies to deal with contextual meaning of certain terms, the features and the pragmatic functions of political language. For example, Schäffner (1997) examines several cases of sensitive political discourse, concerning the changes of functions from the SL to the TL. As is described, the STs and the TTs are mostly embedded in different situations and that they fulfil different functions in their respective situations and cultures. She argues that an initial mechanism for the continuing attempt to link the TT surface structure to a wider discursive and social context, and that cognitive reasoning processes triggered by surface structures can be helpful for both text comprehension and translation practice. It is further explained that linguistic formulations chosen by speakers are based on their shared culture-specific knowledge with the audience. However, apart from translation skills and strategies in the translation studies of political discourse, “it is important to be conscious of the ideology that underlies a translation” (Álvarez and Vidal 1996: 5) because “the study and practice of translation is inevitably an exploration of power relationships within textual practice that reflect power structures within the wider cultural context” (Álvarez and Vidal 1996: 1). Similarly in Schäffner (2004), it is asserted that modern Translation Studies is no longer concerned with examining whether a translation has been “faithful” to the ST. Instead, the focus is on social, cultural, and communicative practices, on the cultural and ideological significance of translation, on the external policies of translations, and on the relationship between translation behaviour and socio-cultural factors. In recent years, the research focus has gradually shifted to ideological and power relations involved in the translation of political discourse. Critical approaches to language study have occasionally been used to investigate translation, in order “to reveal how translation is shaped by ideologies and in this way contributes to the perpetuation or subversion of particular discourses” (Olk 2002: 101). Schäffner (2010) analyses three different types of political discourse and their corresponding translations: an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a joint press conference by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President George Bush, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s reaction to a speech by the Iranian President Ahmadinejad. The analysis shows that in addition to subtle linguistic transformations, translation also often involves filtering of the original meaning, which is reflected in omissions, additions, and reformulations of the initial text in the new context. She argues that discursive practices are not neutral and that translational recontextualisation is determined by the communicative aims and by the institutional policies and ideologies because there are processes of revision and editing even if a full-text translation was submitted. Drawing on CDA, Romagnuolo (2009) uses a diachronic parallel corpora, which consists of a sub-corpus of US presidential inaugural speeches from George Washington’s first inaugural (1789) to George Bush’s second inaugural (2005) and three sub-corpora of their Italian translations, one from published books in different times, the other two from two different newspapers respectively, with an aim to examine the recurring translation strategies and problems that are related to culture-bound

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and value-laden political terms, style, and phraseology. The analysis reveals that newspaper translations of more recent inaugural speeches tend to reorganise the ST through omissions, simplifications and recombination of informational units while less omission rather than expansion of the ST is done in book translations that tend to remain as faithful to the original as possible in terms of syntactic structure. Another interesting finding is that syntactic structures and rhetorical features used for the positive self-representation in the SL tend to be neutralised in news translations. It is argued that motivations behind the translation, whether commissioned by a news agency or a publishing house, are to inform the target readership about a major foreign country’s political event and the personality of its leader because both may have consequences for the future of other nations. Bánhegyi (2008) compares the textual structures of the French referendum speech on the independence of Québec and its English translation with evaluative predicates as a focus, in an attempt to explore power and persuasion involved in the production of the ST and the TT. The findings show that the French version of the Referendum Speech targets receivers’ emotions whereas its English translation focuses on persuasion through factual reasoning. The study concludes that both the French Referendum Speech and its English translation apply the same evaluative predicates as logical arguments, but different lexis as emotive arguments to familiarise voters with the views of one interest group. With a presumption that national government translation is commissioned by the institution itself and thus institutional images are reinforced and often changed in the translations, Choi (2014) adopts a parallel corpus-based approach to examine the translation processes and products produced by three Korean government institutions in an attempt to identify the factor of genre that influences the translations. The study mainly concerns comparing the translations of an online magazine of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, of press briefings by the spokesperson, and of the presidential speeches, where the profiles of translation agents and editors were varied according to document types and translation policies. The result shows that negative comments on a given institution, the society, societal system, or the nation are commonly omitted and translation variations from the source political discourse of different three genres vary to different degrees. Keshavarz and Zonoozi (2011) conducts a CDA-based translation study with a purpose to probe into the manipulation of ideologies in translations of political texts. Using a parallel corpus consisting of three English political books and their Persian translations, the study examines lexical features based on van Dijk’s model and grammatical features based on Fairclough’s framework at a micro-level, and analyses paratexts, such as notes, prefaces, and footnotes in the translated books at a macro-level. The result shows that translators make use of certain grammatical and lexical strategies to realise their ideological stance. At the micro-level, the Persian translators use lexical and grammatical strategies to realise Iranian (Self’s) interests and at the macro-level, they manifest negative attitudes towards the authors of the original books by pinpointing their mistakes and false information about Iran. It is argued that the reasons to account for it is that the interests of “Other” is different from those of “Self” since positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation

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lead to the establishment of the perspective that We and Our political views are superior. Against China’s rising status in the international community, Chinese political discourse has received surprisingly little attention in Translation Studies. Most studies on the translation of political discourse in the Chinese context are still largely limited to translation skills, translation mistakes, and experience description from some professional translators of political discourse who commonly argue that the top priority of the Chinese-English translation of political discourse is being strictly loyal to the original (e.g., Cheng 2003, 2004; Jia 2011; Wang 2011, 2013; Xu 2000). However, Wu (2010), after an analysis of the Chinese-English translation of a government report, argues that the English translation tends to feature the redundant words compared with native English and suggests deleting them. Similarly, Tang (2012), based on a parallel corpus of 45 White Papers and their English translations with several corpus-based compiled dictionaries for reference, finds out many collocation conflicts in the English translations compared with native English and provides a report that 48.2% of the English translations of the surveyed lexical items move beyond their collocation range or conflict with their semantic prosody in native English and two of them have changed the original meaning. These are challenged by Wang (2011, 2013), who claim that it is a taboo in translation of Chinese political discourse to delete what is described “reluctant modifiers” because they might express some meaning in the original political discourse by government leaders and that theories such as semantic prosody and tools like corpus are not always reliable because some counterexamples can be found through the searching engine Google. Though Wang’s claims to some extent show his unawareness of the feature of the probability in corpus studies, “faithful to the original” seems to be commonly regarded as the top principle of the translation of Chinese political discourse and also often ignites conflicting arguments. Of note is that these works are mainly prescriptive in that they attempt to establish the principles for the Chinese-English translation of political discourse by offering “correct translation” (Zhong 2011). This, in one sense, shows the lack of efforts to identify hidden factors involved in translation process, and in another sense, also serves as evidence for the Chinese-English translation policies in China’s national translation institutes for political discourse and their attitudes towards the STs. Moreover, translation of political discourse is largely embedded in institutional political practice, which is overwhelmingly influenced by institutional policies and ideologies. So there is still an increasing need for a descriptive model to identify the sociocultural context and the underlying ideology that motivate the linguistic choices in the translation process. As Schäffner (2010: 274–275) argues, Both the processes and the products can only be fully understood if the whole framework of actions surrounding the translators, as well as the policies and ideologies that underlie these actions, are taken into consideration. It is this interest in analysing the influence of social, cultural, political and ideological context on texts and discourse, which modern Translation Studies shares with Critical Discourse Analysis.

From a perspective of combined CDA models of Fairclough and van Dijk, Li (2013) carries out a textual and sociocultural analysis of translations of Chinese

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political discourse, focusing on translational norms. The corpus used in this study consists of five sets of Chinese political speeches by three formal Chinese leaders and their English translations, including commemorative speech, diplomatic speeches, Party reports, government reports, political speeches on Taiwan. The study argues that the process of political translation is manifested as an institutionalised normgoverned social practice with various translation agents involved in the negotiation of sociopolitical representations. It also shows that translational norms can be not only internalised into translators’ intellectual constructs but also externalised as a sociallyadaptive entity open to change. It is concluded that translations are manifested as the power-mediated knowledge transfer between the source group and the target community and the power mediating process depends on which group holds more discursive power in specific context models. The study also points out that translation, as a form of political practice in an era when China is governed under an increasingly open leadership, demonstrates a tendency to interact with the target readership. With CDA as an analytical tool, Zhu (2011) examines the distributions of the firstperson plural pronoun in a parallel corpus of government reports from 2000 to 2009 and their English translations, and a comparable corpus of State of the Union Address by American government. The analysis shows a sharp increase of the first-person plural pronouns in English translations and the original English texts, compared with the Chinese government reports. The study argues that the results can be explained as a trait of ideological influence as well as a reflection of the difference between the two languages. One thing worthy of mention is that Munday (2007: 197) warns against indiscriminating application of CDA into Translation Studies and attribute all the translation shifts to ideological and power factors, which are in fact made out of translators’ unique personal styles or simply their linguistic incompetence. This can be solved by adopting a corpus-based approach to CDA in Translation Studies and a combined CDA model with textual analysis at the micro-level and sociocultural explanation at the macro-level. It can be clearly seen that the combination of the corpus-based approach and CDA in Translation Studies becomes a new direction as is illustrated in Kim (2013), Li (2013), Hu and Li (2015), Li and Xu (2018), Gu (2018, 2019a, 2019b). It can also be seen that till now, the issue of attitudes and positioning of the translators’ or translation agents and their influence on the translation of political discourse still remain unanswered.

2.3 Appraisal System This section reviews the previous studies where Appraisal System is applied in discourse analysis, with a particular focus on the use of Appraisal System in political discourse analysis. This section also reviews some of the studies that conduct corpusbased discourse analysis from the perspective of Appraisal System, and previous studies on Appraisal System carried out in Translation Studies.

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Appraisal System is originally proposed to explore the interpersonal meanings within the theoretical framework of SFL. Appraisal, as is defined by Martin (2000: 145), relates “to the semantic resources used to negotiate emotions, judgements, and valuations, alongside resources for amplifying and engaging with these evaluations”. This framework bears significance to the studies of evaluative language and is considered as “the only systematic, detailed and elaborate framework of evaluative language” (Bednarek 2006: 32).

2.3.1 Appraisal System in Discourse Analysis Appraisal System has been applied in recent years to the discourse analysis of a wide range of different genres, including news (e.g., Bednarek and Caple 2010; Huan 2016; White 2012; Wang 2004), literary discourse (e.g., Page 2003; Love 2006; Peng 2013), business discourse (e.g., Hommerberg and Don 2015; Pounds 2011; Xu and Xia 2013), academic discourse (e.g., Geng and Wharton 2016; Hood 2010; Zhang 2014; Sheldon 2018), medical discourse (e.g., Gallardo and Ferrari 2010; Zhang and Huang 2014), law and policy discourse (e.g., Martin et al. 2010; Wang 2006), educational discourse (e.g., Kakti¸nš 2014; Myskow 2018), to name just a few. Nevertheless, as the application of Appraisal System to Discourse Analysis carried out to date is largely limited to news, academic and educational discourse because of the research interests and background of the researchers of those studies, the analysis of Appraisal System in political discourse still remains an underexplored area, particularly in the Chinese context. Among the few studies that examine Appraisal System in political discourse, some of them are worth discussing here because they in one way or another illustrate the ways in which Appraisal System is applied and reveal the ideological control and the speaker’s/writer’s ideological positioning to align the audience, which shed some light on our study. Crespo-Fernández (2013) draws on CDA and Appraisal System as theoretical framework to examine the dysphemistic words and expressions identified in Winston Churchill’s speeches during the Second World War, in an attempt to uncover the way in which Churchill’s skilful use of dysphemism as weapons in order to exert ideological control and make the audience believe something in an ostensive way. Abasi and Akbari (2013) conducts a case study to investigate dissent in the political debates of the Iranian presidential elections. Drawing on Appraisal System, the article examines the attitudinal resources in the discursive representation of three major candidates. As central to an ideologically invested strategy, evaluative linguistic resources are found to sharply dichotomise the political actors along a range of positive and negative value positions that dissent from those advanced in the narratives of the dominant power. Oteiza and Pinuer (2010) adopts Appraisal System to examine the ways in which the temporal phases represent the historical memories in official reports of human rights violations in Chile. It is argued that historical memories should be taken as

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a legitimate perspective to the appraisal symbolic representation of the time framework and it is necessary to reevaluate the location of this dimension in the systemic appraisal network. Swain (2012) uses Appraisal System to map some of the visual and verbal resources instantiating evaluative meanings in three political cartoons, and to capture how distinctive patterns of those resources create different interpersonal styles, or evaluative keys. The findings show that evaluative meanings and viewer alignment are subject to the interactions between visual and verbal appraisal and ideation. Eley and Adendorff (2011) provides an appraisal analysis of transformational leadership discourse. By analysing the affect and judgment resources in three texts in 1996, the study shows that the writers evoke high levels of tenacity, a typical feature in transformational leadership discourse, whereas the use of affect resources is completely inconsistent in such discourse. It is argued that the unique sociopolitical context of South Africa in 1996 enabled the author to maximise this affect or judgment configuration to instigate change in his ideal reader, and that the author is adept at using discourse to establish strong, persuasive interpersonal relations with his followers. Apart from these sporadic studies on Appraisal System in political discourse, few studies have taken into consideration Appraisal System across languages and cultures. Very few studies have analysed Appraisal System in political discourse in the Chinese context. But as Chilton (2004: xii) calls, “we will come across the crucial question of discourse, and discourse analysis, across cultures, across languages and through translation. These encounters pose more intriguing, and politically urgent, challenges”. In this sense, to analyse Chinese political discourse from the perspective of Appraisal System, particularly in translation settings, constitutes a challenging yet interesting study.

2.3.2 Appraisal System in Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis As Martin and White (2005: 69–90) illustrates in detail, the bottom-up approach to discourse analysis within Appraisal System starts with the identification of the appraisal resources that convey appraisal meaning and then explores the ways in which appraisal meaning is projected in discourse, focusing on the patterns of some appraisal resources under investigation that can be identified across the entire corpus. Such bottom-up approach is in line with corpus linguistics. Corpus linguistics, especially Birmingham school, relies heavily on the analysis of lexical items, extending to the study of the node words and all semantic patterns around, the “extended units of meaning” (Sinclair 2004: 24). In recent years, corpus approach has been introduced to the analysis of appraisal meaning, including appraisal meaning represented by the co-occurring patterns of the node words and their collocates. Based on Appraisal System, Leticia Moccero (2010) carries out a quantitative analysis of corpus data to investigate the question tags as intersubjective stance markers in casual conversations. By classifying the confirming tags occurring in the

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corpus, this study finds out the possibility of their contribution to the adoption of a particular intersubjective stance. The findings show that question tags contribute to the adoption of a certain intersubjective stance based on the speaker’s communicative needs and that there are some similarities and differences as well in the way these questions function in the different generic fragments embedded in the conversations. Using a social semiotic framework and Appraisal System, Bednarek and Caple (2010) analyses a corpus of 40 environmental reports in terms of evaluative meanings in headings, images and captions of a particular kind of new, multi-semiotic news story genre that makes use of word–image play. The results show that through the captions, environmental issues are construed as an evaluative clash while image and heading play together to co-construe a positive evaluation of these environmental events through appreciation. Bednarek and Caple argue that it may be problematic to apply an Appraisal System that was developed on the basis of one register/genre to a different register/genre. What is important of this study relating to current research is that Appraisal System is register- and genre-dependent, which means that Appraisal System in this current study (i.e., political discourse) may produce different results. Trnavac and Taboada (2012) carries out a corpus-based study to examine the interaction between evaluation and non-veridicality in the context of both conditional and concessive relations, specifically the ways the non-veridical markers contribute to the expression of appraisal meaning in discourse and the ways they influence the interpretation of some aspects of appraisal. The findings show that both concessives and conditionals lead to modified intensification or downtoning. It is argued that the combination of the two rhetorical relations and non-veridical markers have an impact on Engagement but not on Attitude. The results are explained with a fact that both categories share constitutive elements with Engagement and refer to the values ascribed in propositions not the entities being evaluated. In the Chinese context, many studies also adopt corpus-based approach to analyse Appraisal System in discourse. Xu (2013) compares the appraisal resources in spoken narratives produced by Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers after watching the same video episode. A small corpus analysis shows that significant differences in appraisal are found between interlanguage English and native English, as well as between spoken Chinese and native speakers’ English, and that highly consistent differences are observed in the use of appraisal resources in the different sub-categories of Appraisal System. It is argued that these differences may well be accounted for by the difference between Chinese and English. This study implies that near-native expression of evaluation is not possible unless improvement is achieved in speaking in both English Appraisal System and English language. Xin and Huang (2010) identifies the frequencies and the socio-pragmatic purposes of the metadiscourse elements in a small-sized corpus of book reviews that help to construe positive and negative appraisal meaning. The study shows that metadiscourse construes the framing and assigning of appraisal beyond the propositional meaning of discourse. It is argued that metadiscourse carries appraisal meaning and the connection between metadiscourse and appraisal resources is determined by generic properties of a given genre.

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Based on a corpus containing 200 English academic book reviews randomly selected from a linguistic website, Chen (2012) carries out a corpus-based study to investigate appraisal parameters in this text type and investigates whether gender of the reviewers influences the distribution of appraisal parameters manually coded in these book reviews. The results show that the appraisal resources in English academic book reviews can be semantically categorised into five parameters: emotivity, reliability, expectedness, possibility/necessity and style, and that a comparative analysis of the reviewers shows that there are no obvious gender differences in the distribution of appraisal parameters English academic book reviews. As is highlighted by Whitelaw et al. (2005: 625), “collocations are far more potent than isolated words” in relation to “appraisal groups” composed of “coherent groups of words that express together a particular attitude”. Zhang and Huang (2014) examines the collocation pattern of “BE*to” in a small corpus of medical texts with a purpose of finding the appraisal function of this pattern. The results show that the “BE + ADJ + to” is mainly used to appraise research procedure and objects and “BE + V-ed + to” is related to dialogic expansion or contraction to make arguments in medical research articles more objective and reliable. It also shows that there are very few Graduation collocates which expresses the degree of simplicity in the corpus. The reason to account for that result, as the study argues, is that the purpose of medical research article is aimed at exploring medical treatments for those incurable diseases. Stubbs (2001: 215) argues that “repeated patterns show that evaluative meanings are not merely personal and idiosyncratic, but widely shared in a discourse community. A word, phrase or construction may trigger a cultural stereotype”. So the adoption of a corpus approach to identify these repeated patterns that represent appraisal meaning can help uncover the shared cultural and ideological stereotype in that discourse community and the speaker’s/writer’s stance and their alignment with the actual or potential listener/reader within the shared sociocultural context. Though, corpus approach, as Martin and White (2005: 260) argues, “will play a crucial role in the development of the instantiation cline”, not many studies have been found to apply corpus-based approach to Appraisal System. Among the few corpusbased studies on Appraisal System in Discourse Analysis, the corpora adopted are limited to small-sized ones. As for political discourse, very few studies have been conducted to analyse Appraisal System in political discourse in the Chinese context, let alone a corpus-based study of Appraisal System in Chinese political discourse.

2.3.3 Appraisal System in Translation Studies So far at home and abroad, very few studies have been found to introduce Appraisal System in Translation Studies. This is mainly because those scholars working on Appraisal System scarcely take translated discourse into consideration in their research. Zhang (2002) is an early attempt in analysing translation from the perspective of Appraisal System. She argues that translators usually comprehend and convey

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the appraisal meaning of the ST from his own life value, and thus causes different degrees of fidelity to the original texts between different versions. In literary discourse, Vandepitte et al. (2011), based on Appraisal System, presents a quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis of a set of modal words in Natural Selection, chapter four of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and in its two Dutch translations. The results show that the two Dutch translations display different shifts in epistemic stance. Compared with the ST, the nineteenth-century translation shows a positivistic voice but not in the contemporary translation. The findings are discussed in terms of target audiences, languageinherent characteristics, and general translation tendencies. Rodrigues-Júnior and Barbara (2013) adopts Appraisal System to investigate the ways in which appraisal resources construe the evaluative representations of the characters in a novel and its Brazilian translation. Using WordSmith, a kind of software for corpus analysis, this study selects and examines some extracts of the novel and its translation. The findings show that appraisal shifts occur in the translation and the narrator provided most of the appraisal descriptions of femininity, which indicates the importance of the narrative point of view for the construing of plot and for the establishment of ideological standpoints. On the basis of a corpus consisting of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and eight European Portuguese translations for juvenile and adult readerships, Assis Rosa (2008) draws on a combined framework of Appraisal System, narrative theory, and CDA to investigate the intra-textual power relations between the narrator, the characters and the narratees, which are discursively realised by the appraisal resources in the sub-category of Engagement. It is found that the narrator’s negative evaluative stance is on average quantitatively less present in the TTs for teenagers and children than in the TTs for adults. The author argues that translator’s interference is prone to the explicitation and simplification of the TTs, especially when the implied readership is teenagers or children. It is enlightening to the present study in terms of both theoretical framework and methodology, which can be extended from the translation studies of literary works to the investigation of the translation of political discourse. Chen (2007) investigates the reproduction of appraisal lexis in translation of news discourse and argues that, from a prescriptive perspective, translators should avoid intervening in news translation with his own attitudes in order to realise equivalence between appraisal attitudes in the STs and the TTs. Zhang (2013) draws on Appraisal System to examine the trans-editors’ stance and mediation by analysing twenty-four news headlines—every six from one of the four international news events, three of which are from the Western media in English and three from the Chinese media. The analysis shows that all the 24 news headlines are embedded with value-laden indications reflecting different attitudes and stances towards the news events and the global news headlines involve working with discourse that is heavily mediated and recontextualised by the trans-editors. The author argues that the trans-editors’ mediation of attitudes and stances in the original texts can be attributed to their consideration of the target readership, the social value of the target culture, the stance and value positionings of the news agency, and the mode of communication. More recent works that investigate Appraisal System in news translation studies also

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involves Pan (2015). Drawing on Appraisal System and Fairclough’s three-dimension model of CDA, Pan (2015) investigates the Chinese translations of the English news reports on China’s human rights issue in order to identify the ideologically different positioning of the STs and the TTs. L. Pan argues that the Chinese TTs up-scaled the positive reports on China while the negative reports are toned down or not translated at all. Using Appraisal System as a framework, Pérez-González (2007) examines the way in which audiovisual translators handle the naturalness of translated film dialogues in contrast with their original counterparts. The results show that the authenticity of dubbed film conversations is sequentially construed by the characters through the conversational interplay of mood and appraisal telos and that the translation of film conversation triggers off shifts from appraisal telos in the ST to mood telos in the target dialogue. It is argued that the translators’ mediation of the appraisal resources is jointly accomplished by the fictional characters through a combination of prefabricated orality and spontaneous-sounding interaction over extended stretches of conversation. Munday (2012b), drawing on Appraisal System, carries out a case study of two Spanish translations of the subtitles of the American president Obama’s political speeches that are rich in judgemental resources relating to ethics and behaviours. It aims to explore and identify those “critical points” in translation where translators make a conscious or unconscious intervention. The results show that translation shifts occur both in terms of Attitude and Graduation value and Graduation is sometimes reduced through the omission of intensifiers or the choice of a non-core lexical item, but these variations do not display a tendency. It is argued that the possible reasons for these shifts are the translator-subtitlers’ competence and their focus on the ideational content of the speech rather than the interpersonal communication that facilitates the expression of attitude. Taking translation as re-instantiation, Souza (2010) adopts a framework of Appraisal System and a parallel corpus-based approach to investigate how the TTs are semantically related to the STs through a process of re-instantiation in which users negotiate the STs’ meanings according to their repertoires. The data that are used for the identification of examples consist of 11 argumentative political weblog texts in English and their two versions of Brazilian Portuguese translations, with one of the triplets fully analysed. The analysis shows that the re-instantiation process involves shifting appraisal resources from the SL to the TL and from one sub-category of Appraisal System in the SL to another sub-category in the TL, for example, from the sub-category force in the SL to focus in the TL. Souza also calls for other types of research drawing on the model of translation as re-instantiation and in combination with a corpus method as a way of peeking into the translator’s repertoires and also of contrasting the translator’s reading of the ST and the TT to target readers’ reading of the TTs to identify differences in ideological investments. This study is very important and insightful in that it displays the ways in which similar appraisal meanings are re-instantiated in the form of different appraisal resources in different cultures. It casts new light on the current study which might reveal different ways of re-instantiation of the appraisal meanings between Chinese and English by investigating the English translation of the appraisal resources in Chinese political discourse.

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Zheng (2009: 128–165) builds a theoretical model in his monograph illustrating the ways in which intercultural appraisal meaning is construed in translation. With detailed analysis of examples from both literary texts and political documents, Zheng’s study demonstrates how translators properly convey appraisal meaning in the STs in order to realise meaning interaction with the TTs readers and establish harmonious interpersonal relations in intercultural communications. It is argued that while conveying the writer’s stance and taking into account the readers’ reading positioning, the translator himself, consciously or unconsciously, invests in the translation his own attitude and stance and the translator’s intervention may implicitly change readers’ ideology, even social changes in target society. Munday (2012a)—another monograph—has been, so far, one of the most systematic studies on Appraisal System in translation. The book conducts several case studies on the re-instantiation of appraisal meanings in different genres, for example, literary texts, political speech, in different modes, i.e., translation or interpretation, and with different methods, such as a corpus-based approach, translation archives, which also involves more than ten languages. If it is to search for bones from an egg, which means to be over-critical, this study focuses on translators’ subjectivity rather than the relations between the translation of appraisal resources and the hidden ideological power behind, which is the main topic of this current study, and though it claims to adopt a corpus approach, it is largely limited to the discussion of some individual examples from a very small-sized corpus. Other studies also include Qian (2007), which investigates the translation of attitudinal lexis in perfume advertisement with an aim to find the unfaithful translation phenomena and the reasons that cause them; Xu (2011), which analyses the reproduction of attitudes, explicit and implicit evaluation in English-Chinese translation. These studies have more or less attempted to apply Appraisal System in Translation Studies and laid a foundation for our study in this book.

2.4 Summary This chapter discussed some of the previous studies that are related to this current project, including CTS, particularly in the Chinese context, the translation of political discourse, and Appraisal System in Discourse Analysis and Translation Studies. It can be seen from the above review of these previous studies, few of them focus on the reproduction of appraisal resources in the translation of political discourse, particularly in the context of the Chinese-English translation, and almost all of them are limited to the analysis of one passage or at most several passages. Besides, very few studies have taken into consideration the translators’ positionings in the re-instantiation of appraisal values. As Munday (2012a) indicates, the application of Appraisal System in Translation Studies helps verify and expand the framework and methodology of monolingual Appraisal System in a multilingual setting. It is conducive and interesting as well to examine the Chinese-English translation of

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appraisal resources in political discourse and probe into ideological factors in the translation process.

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Swain, Elizabeth. 2012. “Analysing evaluation in political cartoons.” Discourse, Context & Media 1 (2): 82–94. Tang, Yi Jun [唐义均]. 2012. “A survey of collocational clashes in the English translation of the party and the government documents [党政文献汉英翻译中搭配冲突的调查].” Chinese Translators Journal [中国翻译] (1): 87–91. Tian, Hai Long, and Paul Chilton. 2014. “Issues in discourse approach to social transformations in China.” In Discourse, politics and media in contemporary China, edited by Qing Cao, Hai Long Tian and Paul Chilton, 195–208. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Trnavac, Radoslava, and Maite Taboada. 2012. “The contribution of nonveridical rhetorical relations to evaluation in discourse.” Language Sciences 34 (3): 301–318. van Dijk, Teun A. 2005. Racism and discourse in Spain and Latin America. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. van Dijk, Teun A. 2010. “Political identities in parliamentary debates.” In European parliaments under scrutiny: Discourse strategies and interaction practices, edited by Cornelia Ilie, 29–56. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. van Dijk, Teun A. 2015. Racism and the press. London: Routledge. Vandepitte, Sonia, Liselotte Vandenbussche, and Brecht Algoet. 2011. “Travelling certainties: Darwin’s doubts and their Dutch translations.” The translator 17 (2): 275–299. Vertommen, Bram. 2013. “The strategic value of pronominal choice: Exclusive and inclusive “we” in political panel debates.” Pragmatics 23: 361–383. Wang, Jia Lin. 2009. The discursive construction of Hong Kong identity: A critical analysis of the policy addresses of the Kong Kong governments Pre- vs. Post-Transition. PhD thesis, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. Wang, Bin Hua. 2012. “A descriptive study of norms in interpreting: Based on the ChineseEnglish consecutive interpreting corpus of Chinese premier press conferences.” Meta: Journal des traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal 57 (1): 198–212. Wang, Ke Fei [王克非]. 2004. The compilation and application of bilingual parallel corpus [双语 对应语料库: 研制与应用]. Beijing [北京]: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press [外 语教学与研究出版社]. Wang, Ke Fei [王克非], and Xian Yao Hu [胡显耀]. 2008. “A parallel corpus-based study on lexical features of translated Chinese [基于语料库的翻译汉语词汇特征研究].” Chinese Translators Journal [中国翻译] (6): 16–21. Wang, Ke Fei [王克非], and Xian Yao Hu [胡显耀]. 2010. “The explicitation and deviation of personal pronouns in Chinese literary translation [汉语文学翻译中人称代词的显化和变异].” Foreign Languages in China [中国外语] (4): 16–21. Wang, Ping Xing [王平兴]. 2011. “Rethinking of ‘redundant shifts’ in Chinese-English translation [关于汉英翻译“迁移性冗余”的一些思考].” Chinese Translators Journal [中国翻译] (5): 79– 83. Wang, Ping Xing [王平兴]. 2013. “On lexical collocations and semantic prosody in the ChineseEnglish translation of the party and the government documents [关于党政文献汉译英的词语 搭配和语义韵问题].” Chinese Translators Journal [中国翻译] (3): 71–77. Wang, Zhen Hua [王振华]. 2004. “Attitude research on “Hard News” —The second application research on “Appraisal System” [“硬新闻”的态度研究——“评价系统”应用研究之二].” Foreign Language Education [外语教学] (5): 31–36. Wang, Zhen Hua [王振华]. 2006. “An SFL perspective on legal discourse: A case study [“自首”的 系统功能语言学视角].” Modern Foreign Languages [现代外语] (1): 1–9. Wang, Qing, and De Feng Li. 2012. “Looking for translator’s fingerprints: A corpus-based study on Chinese translations of Ulysses.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 27 (1): 81–93. Wang, Ke Fei, and Hong Wu Qin. 2014. “What is peculiar to translational mandarin Chinese? A corpus-based study of Chinese constructions’ load capacity.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 10 (1): 57–77. White, Peter RR. 2012. “Exploring the axiological workings of ‘reporter voice’news stories— Attribution and attitudinal positioning.” Discourse, Context & Media 1 (2): 57–67.

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Whitelaw, Casey, Navendu Garg, and Shlomo Argamon. 2005. “Using appraisal groups for sentiment analysis.” Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management, Bremen, Germany, 31st October–5th Novermber. Widdowson, Henry. 2004. Text, context, pretext: Critical issues in critical discourse analysis. Oxford: Blackwell. Wodak, Ruth, and Paul Chilton, eds. 2005. A new agenda in (critical) discourse analysis: theory, methodology and interdisciplinarity. Vol. 13. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wu, Guang Jun [武光军]. 2010. “Redundant shifts in the English translation of the 2010 report on the work of the government: Analysis and solutions [2010年政府工作报告英译本中的迁移性 冗余: 分析与对策].” Chinese Translators Journal [中国翻译] (6): 64–68. Wu, Guang Jun [武光军], and Ke Fei Wang [王克非]. 2011. “An English comparable corpora-based study of the collocational features in translated texts [基于英语类比语料库的翻译文本中的搭 配特征研究].” Foreign Languages in China [中国外语] (5): 40–47. Xia, Yun [夏云]. 2013. “A diachronic study of the hypotactic features in English-Chinese translated literary texts [英译汉文学语言形合特征的历时研究].” Foreign Language Teaching and Research [外语教学与研究] 45 (1): 105–116. Xiao, Richard. 2010. “How different is translated Chinese from native Chinese? A corpus-based study of translation universals.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15 (1): 5–35. Xiao, Richard. 2011. “Word clusters and reformulation markers in Chinese and English: Implications for translation universal hypotheses.” Languages in Contrast 11 (2): 145–171. Xiao, Richard Zhong Hua [肖忠华], and Guang Rong Dai [戴光荣]. 2010. “In pursuit of the third code: A study of translation universals based on The ZCTC Corpus of translational Chinese [寻 求“第三语码”——基于汉语译文语料库的翻译共性研究].” Foreign Language Teaching and Research [外语教学与研究] (1): 52–58. Xiao, Richard, and Guang Rong Dai. 2014. “Lexical and grammatical properties of translational Chinese: Translation universal hypotheses reevaluated from the Chinese perspective.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 10 (1): 11–55. Xie, Li Xin [谢丽欣], and Kai Bao Hu [胡开宝]. 2015. “The use of English indefinite quantifiers in Chinese-English conference interpreting [记者招待会汉英口译中不定量词的应用研究].” Technology Enhanced Foreign Language Education [外语电化教学] (1): 17–22. Xin, Zhi Ying [辛志英], and Guo Wen Huang [黄国文]. 2010. “Metadiscourse and its evaluationassigning function [元话语的评价赋值功能].” Foreign Language Education [外语教学] (6): 1–5. Xu, Jia Jin [许家金]. 2013. “Investigating the appraisal system in spoken English narratives by Chinese EFL learners [中国学习者英语口头叙事中的话语评价研究].” Foreign Language Teaching and Research [外语教学与研究] (1): 69–79. Xu, Jun [徐珺]. 2011. “Research on business translation from the perspective of appraisal theory [ 评价理论视域中的商务翻译研究].” Journal of PLA University of Foreign Languages [解放军 外国语学院学报] (6): 88–91. Xu, Jun [徐珺], and Rong Xia [夏蓉]. 2013. “A comparative study of English and chinese business discourses from the perspective of appraisal theory [评价理论视域中的英汉商务语篇对比研 究].” Foreign Language Education [外语教学] (3): 16–21. Xu, Wen Sheng [许文胜], and Bo Ran Zhang [张柏然]. 2006. “Corpus-based contrastive studies on the causal conjunctions in English-Chinese classics [基于英汉名著语料库的因果关系连词 对比研究].” Foreign Language Teaching and Research [外语教学与研究] (4): 292–296. Xu, Xin [徐欣]. 2010. “Corpus-based version analysis——Take pride and prejudice for example [基于多译本语料库的译文对比研究——对 《傲慢与偏见》 三译本的对比分析].” Journal of Foreign Languages [外国语(上海外国语大学学报)] (2): 53–59. Xu, Ya Nan [徐亚男]. 2000. “The Characteristics and requirements of the translation of diplomatic documents [外交翻译的特点以及对外交翻译的要求].” Chinese Translators Journal [中国翻 译] (3): 36–39.

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Chapter 3

Theoretical Framework and Methodology

This chapter lays out the theoretical framework and the methodology of the present study. Rooted in CTS, this project adopts a combined theoretical framework of the Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model. Starting from the introduction of this combined framework, this chapter moves on to describe and illustrate the methodology designed for this study. It also explains the specific ways in which these theoretical tools and methodology help answer the research questions addressed in this book.

3.1 A Combined Theoretical Framework 3.1.1 Appraisal System As is mentioned earlier in Chapter 2, James Martin and his colleagues extended the research of interpersonal meaning within the general theoretical framework of SFL by proposing a new analytical framework of evaluation—Appraisal System. Compared with other evaluation studies, Appraisal System is more systemic and clearly categorised to describe evaluative resources in language: it thus is described as “the most fully developed current model of values in discourse” (Thompson and Hunston 2006: 308) and “the only systematic, detailed and elaborate framework of evaluative language” (Bednarek 2006: 32). Appraisal System is thus adopted in the present study as a source of theoretical insight in order to identify the evaluative meanings the translators invested in the English translation of Chinese political discourse. Appraisal meaning is illustrated by three sub-systems: the sub-system of Attitude; of Engagement; and of Graduation. According to Martin and White (2005: 35), Attitude is concerned with “our feelings, including emotional reactions, judgements of behaviour and evaluation of things” whereas Engagement deals with “sourcing © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Li and K. Hu, Reappraising Self and Others, Corpora and Intercultural Studies 6, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9488-5_3

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attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in discourse”, and Graduation attends to “grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred”. Attitude involves three semantic domains of feelings: affect, judgement, and appreciation.1 Affect deals with resources for construing emotional reactions, either positive reactions or negative ones, e.g., happy, confident, sad, anxious (Martin and White 2005: 35, 42, 46); judgement is concerned with attitudes towards behaviour in terms of social esteem and social sanction. Social esteem covers judgement of normality, i.e., how unusual someone is; of capacity, i.e., how capable they are; and of tenacity, i.e., how resolute they are; whereas social sanction deals with judgements of veracity, i.e., how truthful someone is; and of propriety, i.e., how ethical someone is (Martin and White 2005: 35, 42, 52). Lastly, appreciation deals with meaning that construes our evaluations of things and natural phenomena. Appreciation can be realised by reaction about impact (e.g., fascinating, tedious) and quality (e.g., splendid, ugly); composition about balance (e.g., unified, irregular) and complexity (e.g., precise, unclear); and valuation (e.g., creative, worthless) (Martin and White 2005: 36, 43, 56). Similar to affect, both positive and negative evaluations can also be recognised within the sub-categories of judgement and of appreciation. Attitudinal value is endowed with an inherent property of gradability which displays greater or lesser degrees of positivity or negativity (Martin and White 2005: 37, 50, 65, 135). While investigating the re-instantiation of attitudinal meaning, the value of Graduation has to be taken into account because it reflects the degree of the speaker’s/writer’s intensity and attitudinal meanings in many cases are determined by the contextual factors. As Graduation per se implies, it deals with the gradability of evaluation, i.e., scaling values in the other two sub-systems (Martin and White 2005: 37, 135). The sub-system of Graduation operates with the choices of up-scaling or down-scaling the degree of evaluations in relation to force (with upscaling as raise, e.g., “极大增强” [greatly increased], and down-scaling as lower, e.g., “略低” [slightly lower]), which involves inherently scalar assessments along the clines of positivity/negativity according to intensity or amount; and focus (with up-scaling as sharpen, e.g., “完全平等” [complete equality], and down-scaling as soften, e.g., “基本消除” [basically eliminate]), which scales the degree of evaluation according to prototypically of a semantic category (Martin and White 2005: 137). Engagement is employed to deal with “sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in discourse” (Martin and White 2005: 35). “When speakers /writers announce their own attitudinal positions they not only self-expressively ‘speak their own mind’, but simultaneously invite others to endorse and to share with them the feelings, tastes or normative assessments they are announcing” (Martin and White 2005: 95). It is labelled monogloss when bare assertions or a single source of attitude occurs in a communicative context. By contrast, heterogloss refers to locutions that allow more than one voice or dialogistic alternatives (Martin and White 2005: 137). Appraisal System is visualised in Fig. 3.1. 1 Unlike

the sub-categories of Appraisal System, the first letter of the sub-categories of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation is not capitalised to mark their differences, yet it is necessary to know that these are certain terms in Appraisal System.

3.1 A Combined Theoretical Framework

55

Fig. 3.1 An overview of appraisal system (Martin and White 2005: 38)

Furthermore, it is of note that evaluation can be either inscribed through direct realisation of appraisal meaning, or invoked through indirect realisation. Evaluation can be “directly inscribed in discourse through the use of attitudinal lexis” (Martin and White 2005: 61) while invoked evaluation is “subject to co-textual influences” (Martin and White 2005: 139). This study takes into consideration both inscribed and evoked appraisal meaning with a corpus-based approach to generate the recurrent patterns of the appraisal epithets within a −5 / +5 window and a close reading of the concordances.

3.1.2 The Ideological Square Model As Martin and White (2005: 2) argue, appraisal lexis can reveal the speaker’s/writer’s feelings, values, and their social status construed by the texts and they operate to construct relations of alignment and to achieve rapport between the write/the speaker and actual or potential respondents. The investigation of the translation of the appraisal lexis can thus help reveal the feelings, values, and social status of the parties involved in the translation process. Discourse analysis “provides a model for uncovering patterns of choice and relating them to specific concerns and contexts in which the translator works” (Munday and Zhang 2015). It examines “how the use of language is influenced by relationships between participants as well as the effects the use of language has upon

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social identities and relations” (Paltridge 2012: 1). Following Munday and Zhang (2015), discourse analysis is not limited to “beyond the clause” (Martin and Rose 2003), but “an inherent and dynamic feature of the roles played by the participants and of the worldviews (in the vocabulary of some, ‘ideologies’) and identities that underpin or are constructed by them” (Munday and Zhang 2015). CDA regards language use as a social practice and attempts to uncover the ideology and power relations in the interplaying process between language and society (Fairclough 1989; van Dijk 1993; Wodak 1989). It also argues that ideology is linguistically encoded and the most effective way to decode the ideologically demystified meanings is by studying the discourse. Among these CDA models, van Dijk’s (1998, 2006) model of Ideological Square has been predominantly influential over the last two decades because of its feasibility and wide application in the analysis of discourse. Ideology is used in this study on the assumption that “ideologies are formed, changed and reproduced largely through socially situated discourse and communication” (van Dijk 1998: vii) and “discourse meaning, as constructed during production or comprehension, is liable to embody opinions that derive from underlying ideologies” (van Dijk 1995). So ideology is in one way or another involved in the production or comprehension of meaning in discourse. To put it simply, ideology underpins meaning formation. Unlike the prototypical negative notion of ideology, ideology in this book is in its broader sense and is not limited to “a system of wrong, false, distorted or otherwise misguided beliefs, typically associated with our social or political opponents” (van Dijk 1998:2). The notion of ideology in this study follows van Dijk’s definition, Ideologies have been defined as foundational beliefs that underlie the shared social representations of specific kinds of social groups. These representations are in turn the basis of discourse and other social practices. It has also been assumed that ideologies are largely expressed and acquired by discourse, that is, by spoken or written communicative interaction. When group members explain, motivate or legitimate their (group-based) actions, they typically do so in terms of ideological discourse. (van Dijk 2006)

Translation, as a discursive practice, is assumed to be ideology-governed, which indicates that when translators translate the Chinese political discourse, which conveys China’s ideological stance, they, in van Dijk’s terms, explain, motivate, or legitimate their China-based actions because they work in the Chinese government-affiliated translation institutes and thus are in-group members of China. van Dijk (1998: 129) argues that “a group self-schema is the core of all ideologies” and “this schema also explains the essential group-based, and self-serving nature of many ideologies, as representing not only the interests of a group, but also its social position and perspective on any social issue that is relevant for it” (ibid.). Firstly, it is stressed that ideology has a group-based nature as van Dijk (1998: 9) emphasises that ideologies are not individual, idealistic constructs, but the social constructs shared by a group. To put it in another way, “ideologies are constructed, used and changed by social actors as group members in specific, often discursive, social practices” (van Dijk 1998: 9). Secondly, ideology is self-serving. “Ideologies are not primarily about what is true or false, but about how people represent their beliefs about themselves

3.1 A Combined Theoretical Framework

57

and about the social world, truthfully or not. The criterion is not truth but relevance (self-serving social functions, interests)” (van Dijk 1998: 130). As for its group-based nature, ideology is found to have a format structure of the polarisation of in-group and out-group, viz. Self and Other, which is considered as “a prominent feature of the structure of ideologies” (van Dijk 2006). In terms of its self-serving nature, ideologies are operating intuitively as the self-serving principle involved in the interpretation of the world in general and ideologies-driven social practice are organised in a way that they serve the best interests of Self and prevent Others from hurting such interests (van Dijk 1998: 68–69). It is thus assumed that “ideological discourse is generally organised by a general strategy of positive self-presentation (boasting) and negative other-presentation (derogation)” (van Dijk 2006). That is to say, the polarisation of positive selfpresentation and negative other-presentation operates in such a way that good things related to Self are enhanced and bad things mitigated while Other’s bad things are emphasised and good things, in van Dijk’s terms, mitigated, hidden, or forgotten. This can be represented by the well-known Ideological Square Model (van Dijk 1998: 267, 2006) illustrated as follows, a. b. c. d.

Express/emphasise information that is positive about Us. Express/emphasise information that is negative about Them. Suppress/de-emphasise information that is positive about Them. Suppress/de-emphasise information that is negative about Us.

This usual ideological square of discursive group polarisation of positive selfpresentation and negative other-presentation is there in all ideological discourse (van Dijk 2006). It clearly illustrates the overall strategy of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation that is typically in a biased account of facts favouring Self’s, i.e., the speaker’s or writer’s own interests and blaming negative situations and events on Others, viz. “Them” in the Ideological Square Model. Here it shall be stressed that “ideologies feature evaluative beliefs or opinions” (originally italicised) (van Dijk 1998: 33) and “ideologies organise social attitudes” (van Dijk 2006). To put it more specifically, ideologies feature the social opinions of a group since ideologies by definition are social and shared (van Dijk 1998: 33). As van Dijk (2006) describes, “since people acquire, express and reproduce their ideologies largely by text or talk, a discourse analytical study of ideology is most relevant”. In this sense, one of the most important ways to reveal ideology is to make a systemic analysis of the discourse that conveys ideological beliefs or opinions. Very plainly, it is stated that “we want to know what ideologies actually look like, how they work, and how they are created, changed and reproduced, we need to look closely at their discursive manifestations (originally italicised)” (van Dijk 1998:6) because [T]he ideological polarization between ingroups and outgroups–a prominent feature of the structure of ideologies—may also be systematically studied at all levels of text and talk, e.g., by analysing how members of ingroups typically emphasise their own good deeds and properties and the bad ones of the outgroup, and mitigate or deny their own bad ones and the good ones of the outgroup. (van Dijk 2006)

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To sum up, ideology is a self-serving schema with a key property of positive selfpresentation and negative other-presentation illustrated in the Ideological Square Model. However, of note is that ideology is a social representation, and it features groups at macro-level, which means that group members may not, on some occasion, identify themselves with the group and thus not share the ideology of the group (van Dijk 1998: 71). Another point worthy of mention is that two groups, which may have different ideologies, may well cooperate to achieve a common objective and jointly defend their shared interests, which means that “ideological opponents may thus become allies in pursuing the realisation of the same goals” (van Dijk 1998: 171). Such an Ideological Square Model offers thought-provoking insights to the investigation of the variations of stance in the process of translation in that the English translation of Chinese political discourse, which conveys China’s ideological attitudes and stance, is also ideology-governed social practice. This means that the feature of polarisation of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation might also be represented during the translation process and finally in the TTs. By analysing the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse, the underlying ideologies that govern the translation process can be revealed.

3.1.3 Summary of Theoretical Framework This book adopts a combined theoretical framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model to identify the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in the English translation of Chinese political discourse and the variations of stance towards China, i.e., Self and other countries, i.e., Others. This combined framework sheds light on this study in that it helps to categorise the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse and at the same time offers an ideological structure of the polarisation of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, which is conducive to the description of China and other countries in the English translation of Chinese political discourse with respect to the stance towards them.

3.2 Methodology This section begins with the exposition of research methods and then illustrates corpus design, data collection procedure, and data analyses accordingly within the theoretical framework depicted in 3.1.

3.2 Methodology Table 3.1 The Chinese-English parallel corpus of political discourse

59 Number of files

Size

STs (Chinese)

90

1,469,213 (characters)

TTs (English)

90

1,090,850 (words)

Total

180

2,560,063

3.2.1 Research Methods Drawing on a combined theoretical framework of Appraisal System (Martin and White 2005) and the Ideological Square Model (van Dijk 1998: 267, 2006), this study adopts a corpus-based discourse analysis approach to investigate the translation of the appraisal epithets in political discourse from Chinese to English. It aims to identify the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in the Chinese-English translation of political discourse and reveal whether there are any variations of the stance towards Self, i.e., China and Other, i.e., other countries, in the TTs.

3.2.2 Corpus Design As is mentioned above, this book is aimed at investigating the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets and the variations of the stance towards China and other countries in the process of the English translation of Chinese political discourse. Following the approach adopted in Hu (2011: 41–50), a Chinese-English parallel corpus of political discourse is built for this study, which consists of the work reports of the National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the work reports of the Central Chinese Government, the documents of the Ministries of the Central Chinese Government, white papers issued by the Central Chinese Government and their corresponding translations. All the documents and their translations are downloaded from the website of the State Council Information Office and the website of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau,2 two translation institutes for the Central Chinese Government and the Central Committee of the CPC. All in all, ninety documents are collected, among which nine are the Chinese Communist Party documents, sixteen Central Government work reports, eight Central Government Ministries’ documents, and fifty-seven white papers. The Chinese political documents and their translations are cleaned to delete the garbled marks such as “ˆ” and stored in different folders, respectively. All texts and their translations are then aligned at the sentence level for convenient search and identification of the parallel concordances of the appraisal epithets. The detailed information of the Chinese-English parallel corpus of political discourse is shown in Table 3.1.

2 http://www.scio.gov.cn/zfbps/index.htm

and http://en.theorychina.org/.

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Two versions of this parallel corpus are stored separately, one tagged and the other not tagged for further analysis. The Chinese characters in the corpus are segmented and tagged with part of speech in order to retrieve all the country names. The software for automatic POS tagging is ICTCLAS, the most widely used Chinese POS tagging and word segmenting software packages (Xiao 2010), which covers the tagging of place names. To ensure that segmentation and POS tagging are correct, manual proofreading by native Chinese speakers is also carried out. To illustrate the features of Chinese political discourse, the contents of the parallel corpus are described in detail here. A Chinese government work report normally covers two parts. The first part is a review of the government work of the previous year or of the last five years if that year witnesses the government transition, and the second part is composed of the main tasks and the government work plans of the current year. The review part contains measures and achievements that the government made in people’s well-being, economy, education, diplomatic work, and the like. The later part mainly covers the tasks and the plans of the government in the aforementioned sectors. Meantime, a government work report also demonstrates work plans for the transformation of government functions, such as the development of democracy, simpler administration for more work efficiency. The CPC work reports are delivered at the National Congress of the Communist Party of China that takes place every five years. These reports generally cover the experiences and achievements of the last five years and work plans for the next five years in such fields as politics, economics, culture, diplomatic affairs, party construction, though there are some preferences in reports of different periods. As the CPC is the ruling party of China, it is claimed that “government work reports are the implementation of the CPC work reports” (Zhang 2010: 58). Both the CPC work reports and government reports are authoritative and demonstrate China’s policies and stance on the important issues of China. Government white papers usually focus on certain political issues such as China’s positioning on Diaoyu Island, China’s economic and trade cooperation with African countries and are another vital source of documents elaborating China’s policies to the world as is argued by C. Y. Hua (2012) that “government white paper has become an important way for international community to know China’s situation, development, standpoints, and policies”. To make all the texts of different sources within the same time span, we collected all the documents issued from the year 2000 because it is the time when Chinese Premier firstly delivered government work, one important source of data in the corpus, to the public through live TV. All these documents are translated by top-rank professional Chinese translators, then reviewed by native speakers of English and finalised by senior professional Chinese trans-editors (Cheng 2002: 195). Of note is that the translators involved in the English translation of Chinese political discourse are Chinese though some native speakers of English are invited for review of their translation. This means that translation direction from Chinese into English is from native language into a second language. Another point worthy of mention is that all these translation participants are either the employers of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, The State Council Information Office, or China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration,

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all of which are either a national-level department of the CPC, the ruling party, or the Central Chinese government. This indicates two features of the translators of Chinese political discourse. One is that these translators are professionally trained high-rank translators and experts in both Chinese and English. The other is that all these professional translators are employed by the Chinese government, i.e., the insiders of the national translation institutes, which, to some extent, implies that they hold the same attitudes and stance as the CPC and the CPC-led Chinese government do since they are the institutionalised parts of the Chinese governing bodies. Previous studies on institutional translation have suggested that under the institutionalised setting, personal voices tend to be muted but follow the institutionalised voices (e.g., Yun 2015). This study will examine whether this argument put forward in previous studies can also be applicable to the English translation of Chinese political discourse, the institutional translation in the Chinese context.

3.2.3 Data Collection There are three processes dealing with data collection. The first step is the retrieval of the appraisal epithets for further analysis. The number of the appraisal epithets and their distribution in the corpus of Chinese political discourse are generated in terms of different subcategories of Appraisal System and the different polarity of the appraisal epithets for both the Self- and the Other-categories. The second process deals with the English translation of these appraisal epithets, where the frequencies of different translation strategies are calculated on the basis of the classification of the appraisal epithets. Thirdly, statistical analyses are conducted for the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets and the variations of stances towards China and other countries through translation. These steps of data collection are explained in detail in the following sections.

3.2.3.1

Identification of Appraisal Epithets

Firstly, with the corpus software package WordSmith (6.0), all place names are retrieved from the POS tagged corpus of Chinese political discourse and these place names are grouped into the Self-category or the Other-category with China in the Self-category and all the other countries in the Other-category. Here some items are deleted manually since these items, though all have the same tag as country names, actually refer to a city, area, or a continent, such as New York, Sydney, Middle East, Asia. Of note is that China or the Self-category includes six words, i.e., “中国” [China], “中华人民共和国” [the People’s Republic of China], “我国” [our country], “我 方” [Our side], “中方” [China’s side], “祖国” [motherland], which are termed the Self-items, all referring to China. Such information is illustrated in Fig. 3.2. The Other-category contains 155 countries, which are termed the Other-items. Since “中

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Fig. 3.2 The list and the number of the self-items

方” [China’s side] is included in the Self-category, these alternative items for other countries shall also be taken into account. After a sample search for the alternatives for the ten other country names that most frequently occur in the corpus, with the United States occurring 282 times, Russia 122 times, Iran 120 times, Japan 112 times, the UK 71 times, Sudan 71 times, Pakistan 66 times, India 65 times, North Korea 59 times, France 54 times, respectively, it is found that the alternative items that refer to some countries do occur in the corpus too. Those alternative items that refer to other countries such as “美方” [the U.S’ side], “俄方” [the Russia’s side], “日方” [the Japan’s side], “英方” [the UK’s side] are also included in the Other-category in this study. All these steps return 159 items in the Other-category as is displayed in Fig. 3.3. Secondly, still using WordSmith (6.0), all collocates “within the usual span of five words to the left and right” (Baker et al. 2013: 238) of the Self-items and of the Other-items are generated in order to narrow down the appraisal epithets to those that are closely related to the Self- or Other-items. The concordance lines for both the Self-items and the Other-items are also generated for further tagging of the appraisal epithets within Appraisal System. These are shown in Figs. 3.4 and 3.5, respectively.

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Fig. 3.3 The list and the number of the other-items

Fig. 3.4 The concordance lines of the self-items

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Fig. 3.5 The concordance lines of the other-items

For the statistical computation of collocation relation, a reference corpus we use is a combined corpus that contains two general Chinese corpora, i.e., the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (hereafter LCMC) and the Texts of Recent Chinese (hereafter TORCH). Both LCMC and TORCH are balanced Chinese corpora with a size of slightly over one million tokenised words. As LCMC contains materials in early 1990s while TORCH covers materials mostly published in 2009, the time span between the texts in these two corpora could largely represent the changes and the real use of Chinese since 1990s. Thus the combination of LCMC and TORCH constitutes an appropriate reference corpus for this study. In order to retrieve a list of collocates, a minimal frequency is set as one because many countries in the Other-category occur only once in the corpus and specific mutual information is adopted for relation statistics. But it is necessary to point out that the purpose to generate collocates in this study is not to carry out a collocation research as is in corpus linguistics, which highlights frequency and statistical methods to retrieve collocates (Gries 2013), but to simply identify closely related appraisal epithets that would be largely representative of all countries in the corpus of Chinese political discourse. So the minimal frequency of one time co-occurring and collocation statistics (MI value) is undoubtedly acceptable in this study. Figures 3.6 and 3.7 illustrate the collocates of the Self-items and of the Other-items, respectively. For the Self-items, 7716 concordance lines have been retrieved and 4285 collocates are generated. For the Other-items, 3577 concordance lines have been identified and 15,907 collocates are generated. According to the working definition of appraisal epithet described in the introduction chapter, it is obvious that not all collocates here are appraisal epithets because the wordlist of collocates contain words of all different word classes and those that are adjective or adverbs are also not necessarily appraisal epithets. Only those collocates are appraisal epithets that are adjectives or adverbs

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Fig. 3.6 The collocates of the Self-items

Fig. 3.7 The collocates of the other-items

and at the same time indicate China’s or other countries’ attitudinal view on the property of feelings, behaviours, or things, either positive or negative, the source or the gradability of these attitudinal views. So, collocates that do not function as appraisal epithets are filtered in this study. Those appraisal epithets under investigation are further identified. Thirdly, all words that are tagged as adjective or adverb are retrieved from the corpus of Chinese political discourse. These words, potentially, are appraisal epithets according to its working definition in Chapter one. With WordSmith and Excel, 1753 adjectives and adverbs are attained and de-tagged as well. Here, the ways in which

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the potential appraisal epithets are chosen from these adjectives and adverbs are explained in detail because they largely influence the results of this study. It should be well kept in mind that the tagging software ICTCLAS, though it is claimed 98% of accuracy and most widely used Chinese tagging system (Xiao 2010), still produces some errors in tagging. For example, in the clause “成为中 国政府[[施政]]的基本准则” [They are basic norms of the Chinese government for its administration], “施政” [administration] is tagged as adjective because there is a word “的”, usually an adjective mark, after “施政”. However, “施政” here in Chinese can be explained as a noun, equivalent to “administration” in English, or in another way, a verb phrase with “施” meaning “implement” and “政” meaning “administration”. And there are also some other words which can be both adjective and other word class. For example, the word “实惠” [affordable, benefit]. This word can be either an adjective or a noun, depending on the context in which it is used. For the words which are tagged wrongly as adjective or adverb, they are directly deleted from the wordlist. For those multi-word class lexical items, their occurrences are counted in only when they function as adjective or adverb, which is the precondition for an appraisal epithet. Some other words, which do not convey clear appraisal meaning, though in the wordlist of adjectives and adverbs, are also removed. For example, all words that refer to a space, or a specific year are removed, such as “海上” [on the sea], “2012年” [the year of 2012] because they, in the context of Chinese political discourse, denote a fact or actual situation, which in some sense, do not convey an appraisal meaning or stance. Similar cases also include “有线” [cable] as in “有线电视” [cable TV], “ 美籍” [American] in “美籍人士” [American people], “民事” [civil] in “民事案件” [civil case], “民事法律” [civil law]. There are also some other problems, such as errors in word segmenting. Different from English, there is no space inserted between Chinese characters. Chinese characters thus have to be segmented before they can be dealt with by those corpus software packages like WordSmith, ParaConc. ICTCLAS also produces some errors in word segmenting as it does in POS tagging. For example, “美” [beautiful, good quality, the United States, etc.], which is only a character in a word such as “美元” [US dollars], “拉美” [Latin America] or a proper noun such as “阿沛阿旺晋美” [Ngapoi Ngawang Jigme, the name of a high-rank Tibetan official in the Chinese governing body]. However, “美” itself can also work as a full word. It is a short name of the United States, a country name in the Other-category. At the same time, it also means “beautiful”, so it has a role as an appraisal epithet, which conveys a positive attitudinal meaning. All these words that are segmented wrongly are manually checked. In short, a Chinese character is not taken into account in this study until it is a fully independent word in the context and conveys appraisal meaning rather than a character in a word because of wrong segmentation. As emphasised above, it is of note that these adjectives and adverbs do not necessarily work as appraisal epithets, because appraisal epithet is defined as an adjective or adverb which indicates the speaker’s or writer’s attitudinal view on the property of the thing, person, or action described, either positive or negative in Chapter one. That is to say, one precondition for being an appraisal epithet is that it conveys appraisal

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meaning. So it is essential and a decisive step to tag these potential appraisal epithets within the framework of Appraisal System. Following Bednarek (2008: 152), all the potential appraisal epithets are coded within Appraisal System. In this process, The Language of Evaluation (Martin and White 2005) is also frequently consulted for help, and personal communications with Professor James Martin, the main designer of Appraisal System, are also involved via face to face talk or email, particularly when dealing with some problematic cases. But instead of analysing appraisal lexis twice with a sufficiently large time interval between the analyses (Bednarek 2008: 152), this study adopts a more effective twocoder method in order to avoid the subjectivity of this type of semantic tagging. One is an author of this book and the other is a main compiler and the annotator of the first Chinese corpus of Appraisal System (Peng et al. 2012). Both of them are proficient in Appraisal System and an interrater reliability test is conducted to examine their tagging consistency. To improve tagging accuracy, it is agreed between the two raters that these words are tagged with a fourth level of sub-systems of Appraisal System so that there are more chances to reach the agreement at the third-level sub-system of Appraisal System because this study only adopts a third-level sub-system tagging for investigation. At the same time, the polarity of appraisal meaning is also tagged. For example, “从未” [never] is tagged with “deny-disclaim-engagement”; “ 辉煌” [splendid] is tagged with “valuation-appreciation-attitude/positive”; “猖獗” [rampant] is tagged with “propriety-judgement-attitude/negative”; “充裕” [ample] is tagged with “quantification-force-graduation/up-scale”. But in this study, only the third-level sub-system is under study. Appreciation epithets like “辉煌” thus are examined as “appreciation-attitude”, no matter whether it is “valuation”, “reaction”, or “composition”, and judgement epithets like “猖獗” are observed as “judgementattitude/negative” without taking into account whether it is normality, capacity, tenacity, veracity, or propriety, the fourth-level sub-systems of Appraisal System. Though there are cases that are tagged differently at the fourth level of Appraisal System, a high agreement is reached at the third-level tagging with an interrater reliability test result of 0.92.3 And for the cases that the two raters have disagreement in tagging, it is further discussed and some experts are also consulted, including Professor James Martin, until a full agreement is reached. All these tagging methodological considerations are consistent across all the data. Within the contexts of these potential appraisal epithets through their concordance lines, all the adjectives and adverbs are tagged within the framework of Appraisal System. Of note is that Appraisal System is a meaning-based analytical framework and meaning is largely generated in context. Therefore, the tagging of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse depends on the context of these appraisal epithets because, as Martin and White (2005: 52) point out, “a given lexical item will vary its attitudinal meaning according to that context”. For example, “紧张” can 3 The

agreement coefficient of Gwet’s AC1 is adopted here with which 1 means an absolute agreement and 0.67 marks a cutting line between agreement and disagreement. So here the result of 0.92 indicates a very high agreement between the two raters.

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mean “nervous”, “strained”, or “short of”. It thus can be tagged with “affect attitude/negative” when it is used to mean “nervous”, modifying a personified country. But in the corpus of Chinese political discourse, all cases of “紧张” are found to be referring to “strained relationship” or “short of funds and materials”. So it is tagged with “appreciation-attitude/negative” in this context. It should also be kept in mind that an appraisal epithet can be tagged into different sub-systems within different contexts. For example, the word “友好” [friendly] is tagged “appreciation-attitude/positive” when it works as an adjective and collocates with “关系” [relationship], and “条约” [treaty], but it is tagged with “judgementattitude/positive” when it works as an adverb and collocates with “相处” [get along with], and “交往” [associate]. The same applies to “非法” [illegal, illegally], which is both a judgement epithet and an appreciation epithet. It is tagged with “judgementattitude/negative” as it is in “菲律宾[[非法]]侵占中国南沙群岛” [the Philippines has illegally occupied a number of maritime features of China’s Nansha Islands]. But it is tagged with “appreciation-attitude/positive” in the context like “非法枪支” [illegal guns]. There are some other appraisal epithets whose polarity is found to be opposite even they are in the same larger sub-system. For example, the word “一 定” [some, surely] is a Graduation epithet with multiple senses. When it collocates with “程度” [degree], it is a focus epithet with its polarity of softening. When it co-occurs with “能够” [can, could], and “要” [must], it displays a forced meaning plus up-scaling polarity. However, the above examples are still in the same larger system of Attitude or Graduation. An appraisal epithet can also function across different sub-systems, for example, in both the sub-system of Attitude and the sub-system of Graduation. For instance, when it comes to “成功” [successful, successfully], it is tagged with “appreciation-attitude/positive” when it collocates with “经验” [experience], and “实践” [practice]. But it is tagged with both “judgement-attitude/positive” and “intensification-force-graduation/up-scale” when it collocates with “解决” [solve], and “开创” [initiate]. As is illustrated in those examples, the sub-systems of Appraisal System are in conjunctive relationships, which means, for example, one appraisal epithet can be both an Attitude resource and at the same time a Graduation resource. In the fourth process of identification of the appraisal epithets, Excel is employed to match the wordlist of the appraisal epithet generated from the whole corpus with the word list of those collocates of the Self-items and of the Other-items. The process starts from making a wordlist of all appraisal epithets and the wordlists of all collocates of both the Self-items and the Other-items. The way to decide whether these collocates are appraisal epithets or not is to ascertain whether these collocates also occur in the wordlist of all appraisal epithets. If they also occur in the wordlist of all appraisal epithets, this means that they are also appraisal epithets, and then are chosen for further study. If they do not, this means that though they are the collocates of the Self-items or of the Other-items, they are not appraisal epithets, and thus are ignored in this study. WordSmith is used to remake a wordlist by adopting both the list of all appraisal epithets and the wordlist of all collocates of the Selfitems. Lexical items that occur twice in this new wordlist are the appraisal epithets of the Self-category for further investigation. Similar steps are taken for the appraisal

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epithets of the Other-category. By doing so, all appraisal epithets for the Self- and the Other-categories are retrieved from the list of collocates of each group. These appraisal epithets of each category are then marked within Appraisal System and are grouped accordingly. In addition, all these appraisal epithets are also categorised in accordance with its polarisation, i.e., positive or negative within the Attitude system and up-scale or down-scale within the Graduation system. But it still does not necessarily mean all these appraisal epithets are the final research objects, given the complexity of semantic tagging which is largely dependent on the contexts in which they are used. Therefore, whether these appraisal epithets are epithets and convey appraisal meaning have to be decided in the context which requires a closer reading of each concordance line. To further examine these potential appraisal epithets and observe the ways they are translated, it is necessary and vital to establish the corresponding relationship between appraisal epithets and their translations. To achieve this purpose, the parallel concordance lines are retrieved for further examination.

3.2.3.2

Parallel Concordances

ParaConc, a parallel corpus software package, is employed with a batch search to retrieve all parallel concordance lines of the Self-items and of the Others-items. And all the parallel concordance lines are copied to another text processing software called EmEditor in order to find all the concordance lines that contain those appraisal epithets identified after the previous steps. Here again some filters are established to further remove those appraisal epithets that do not meet the requirement of this study. By a batch search of the collocational appraisal epithets with regular expression, all the concordances of the Self-item that contain any of the appraisal epithets are highlighted so that all the concordance lines containing these collocational appraisal epithets as contextual lexical items can be easily recognised. This largely helps further manual analysis. It shall be noted that not all the retrieved concordance lines are the ones needed for this study since the words in the appraisal wordlist may also appear in the concordance lines but not within the eleven-window from the left five to the right five collocates. The concordance lines for further investigation must meet two requirements: (i) it contains the appraisal epithets; (ii) the appraisal epithets are within the eleven-window of the Self-item or of the Other-item. By manual analysis, all concordance lines are examined carefully to make sure the appraisal epithets meet the requirements of this study. Here are some examples to illustrate the reasons why some appraisal epithets are removed. Those that contain the Self- or Other-items but do not represent the country are removed from this study. For example, “美国药典会” [the United States Pharmacopoeia] in the concordance line “中国药品生物制品检定所和国家药典委员 会分别与[[美国]]药典会…” [China’s National Institute for the Control of Pharmaceutical and Biological Products and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia Commission have signed cooperation memorandums with the United States Pharmacopoeia…],

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is actually not a governmental institute that represents the government of the United States. There are some other cases that do not refer to a country. As an Other-item, “朝鲜” [Korea] can refer to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a country title, but can also refer to one of the ethnic groups in China, “朝鲜族” [Korean Ethnic group]. Another similar case is “蒙古” [Mongolia]. Therefore, when Korea and Mongolia are referring to the country, the concordance lines of them are kept for further analysis and the concordance lines of them are removed if they denote ethnic groups. Those collocates that do not convey an appraisal meaning are not taken into account in this study. This can be clearly illustrated in the following example. “仁 爱” [benevolent], the collocate of Philippines, refers to the name of Second Thomas Shoal, China’s Ren’ai Jiao [Island of Benevolence]. “安全” [secure, safe], the collocate of the United States, is also part of “美国国家安全局” [The National Security Agency of the United States]. “平等” [equal], the collocate of Sudan, is removed because it is part of an organisation title as in “苏丹政府与达区反对派 ‘正义与[[ 平等]]运动 ’及‘ 解放与正义运动’ 在多哈分别签署有关停火协议” [the government of Sudan signed ceasefire agreements with the Darfur opposition group Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Liberation and Justice Movement (LJM) respectively in Doha]. “仁爱”, “安全”, “平等” mentioned here are simply part of the names of a place or an institute, and no longer work as appraisal epithets. Thus they are not taken into account in this study. The collocate of the United States “太” [too, excessively] refers to “太平洋” [the Pacific Ocean] in “亚太” [Asia-Pacific]. The collocate of Vietnam “民主” [democratic] is also deleted because it is part of the full title of “the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1945–1976), known as North Vietnam. The appraisal epithets that do not modify the Self- or Other- items are also removed from further examination. For example, “硬”, an collocate of the Self-item, is not to modify China, but works as an modifier of its collocate “道理” [way, principle] as in “发展是硬道理” [Development is the fundamental principle]. Other cases like “[[乌 克兰]]文化日在华成功举办” [The Ukrainian Culture Day event was successfully held in China] are also deleted since the appraisal epithet “成功” is not appraising the country Ukraine. The appraisal epithets that appraise the Other-items even though they occur in the concordance lines of the Self-items are counted for the Other-items. For those appraisal epithets that appraise the Self-items but occur in the concordance lines of the Other-items, their occurrences are regarded as occurrences for the Self-items. But they are not repeatedly counted, which means if the appraisal epithets occur in the concordance lines of both the Self- and the Other-items, they are counted only once. For example, “无私” [generous] in “中国为[[赞比亚]]经济发展提供 了无私援助” [Zambia appreciates China’s generous assistance] appraises China instead of Zambia, though it occurs in a concordance line of Zambia, an Otheritem. There are also cases in which appraisal epithets, though working as the collocates of the Self- or Other-items, are not appraising them. For example, in the following concordance line, which reads, “但是一些发 发达国家却仍然坚持旧有思 其相关产品 维 ,对向中国出口高端装备和高新技术产品设置了诸多限制, 导致其

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对[[中国]]出口增长缓 缓慢” [Unfortunately, some developed countries, sticking to their old way of thinking, impose various restrictions on the export of high-end equipment and advanced technologies to China, resulting in slow growth in the export of these sectors.], “缓慢” [slow, slowly] is not appraising China but indirectly modifying developed countries. A similar case is found in the concordance line “[[中国]]高度 重视发展与友好国家的防务技术合作关系” [China attaches great importance to developing cooperation in defence technology with friendly countries], where “友 好” [friendly] is not appraising China but modifying other countries, though it is a collocate of China. For those appraisal epithets whose appraisers are not the Self- or Other-items or cannot be identified, they are not considered in this study. As for the tagging of polarity of the appraisal epithets, it is necessary to take into account the function of the collocates of the appraisal epithets. As is described in this chapter, there are two types of the appraisal epithets, i.e., inscribed or infused. Some appraisal epithets themselves display a clear polarity while some others exhibit a polarity in combination with their collocates. Therefore, in dealing with those infused appraisal epithets, particularly Graduation resources, the polarity of these collocates has to be taken into consideration. To take “巨大” for example, as an infused appreciation resource, whether it is positive or negative is not decided by itself, but largely depends on its collocates. When it collocates with a negative lexical item, say, “灾难” [disaster], it is tagged with appreciation plus a negative polarity. It is marked with appreciation plus a positive polarity when it collocates with positive words like “成就” [achievement]. For these infused appraisal epithets, therefore, their polarity is counted according to the semantic polarity of their collocates. That is to say, when “巨大” collocates with “成就” [achievement], its polarity is counted once as positive and its polarity is calculated once as negative when it collocates with “灾难” [disaster]. And the polarity of the positive appraisal epithets collocating with negative lexical items and of the negative appraisal epithets co-occurring with positive collocates are double-checked to make sure they are correctly tagged. And of note is that the polarity of these appraisal epithets sometimes depends on the reader’s stance. As Martin and White (2005: 62) argue, it is vitally important to specify one’s reading position when analysing appraisal meaning and there are three types of reading positioning, depending on “whether one is reading a text compliantly, resistantly or tactically” (ibid.). A strategy of tactical reading is recommended in order to display the writer/speaker’s stance that they invest in the discourse. Unlike compliant or resistant reading, which either favours or opposes the reading stance deployed by the meaning organisation in the text, tactical reading refers to a naturalised interested reading to direct “in the kinds of attitude it wants readers to share” (Martin and White 2005: 63). This can be illustrated by the example “[[中国]]坚决反 对和遏制日本采取任何方式侵犯中国对钓鱼岛的主权” [China is firmly opposed to Japan’s violation of China’s sovereignty over Diaoyu Dao in whatever form and has taken resolute measures to curb any such act]. In this sentence, “坚决” [firmly, resolutely], one of the collocates of China, is tagged with “judgement-attitude/positive” and at the same time also with “intensification-force/up-scale”. And “遏制” [curb], a collocate of “坚决”, in Chinese usually has a negative connotation. However, since

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from China’s stance, to curb Japan’s act to violate China’s sovereignty is an act of justice, “坚决” in this case is thus considered to be followed by a positive collocate. There are some words that can be coded with different word class. To take “统 一” [unify, unified, unification] for example, it can work as a verb, a noun, or an adjective in Chinese, depending on the context where it is used. Therefore, those concordances in which “统一” does not work as an adjective are deleted as can be seen in the sentence “我们坚信, 在包括台湾同胞在内的全体中华儿女的共同努 力下, [[中国]]的完全统一一定能够实现!” [We firmly believe that with the efforts of all Chinese people, including our Taiwan compatriots, complete reunification of China will definitely be realized !]. “努力” [make efforts, try hard] is a noun used in the “经过各方努力, [[中国]]完成了 “十一五” 规划提出的节能目标” [Through the efforts of all sectors, China accomplished its energy conservation goals listed in the Eleventh Five-Year Plan.], and thus is not an appraisal epithet. This is different from “努力” as an adverb in the following sentence “规划期间 (2011-2015年), [[中 国]]将努力保持现有出口竞争优势, 加快培育以技术” [During the 12th Five-year Plan period (2011–2015) China will make efforts to maintain its current competitive edge in exports, foster new advantages centring on technology, branding, quality, and services at a faster pace], in which it is an appraisal epithet tagged with judgementattitude/positive and force-graduation/up-scale. Some words have different senses. They are appraisal epithets in one sense but not in another. For example, in the following sentence, “为了掩盖中菲海域划界争端的 实质,绕过 过4 [[中国]]2006年声明, 菲律宾将海域划界争端拆分,抽取其中几个事 项作为孤立的问题提交仲裁” [To cover up the maritime delimitation nature of the China-Philippines dispute and to sidestep China’s 2006 declaration, the Philippines has split up the dispute of maritime delimitation into discrete issues and selected a few of them for arbitration], “过”, as a part of the lexical item “绕过” [sidestep], does not work as an appraisal epithet as it is in “过高” [too high, excessively high]. Therefore, it is removed from the parallel concordance lines. There are other cases that concern the controversial issue of what can be considered as collocation. For example, in the following two concordance lines “保障犯罪嫌疑 人, 被告人及 及时获得辩护. [[中国]]1979年制定的刑事诉讼法规定, 被告人在法 院审判阶段才有权委托” [Ensuring timely defense. < seg id = ”173” > The Criminal Procedure Law of 1979 stated that a defendant is not entitled to appoint a defender until he/she is undergoing court trial], “及时” [timely] is within the +5/−5 window of the node word “中国”, but appear in another sentence. Though whether the lexical item and its collocates can be separated in two consecutive sentences is still a controversial issue in corpus linguistics, here in this study, “及时” is not considered as a collocate of China if they are separated in different sentences. Another problem of collocation retrieval is that a collocate can in some cases repeat its occurrence. In the following example, “2011年 2月,[[利比亚]]局势急 急剧动荡, 在利比亚的中资 机构, 企业和人员面临重大…” [In February 2011, the turbulent situation in Libya posed grave security threats to Chinese institutions, enterprises and nationals in that country], “急剧” [sharp] is within a left five to right five window of two Other-items 4 “绕过”

is segmented as “绕 过”, which means that here “过” itself is considered as a word.

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“利比亚” [Libya] in this concordance line. In this study, “急剧” as an appraisal epithet in this case is counted only once because it occurs only once. There are cases that involve errors in the segmenting of words or search with regular expression. If China, for example, is part of the title of an organisation, it is not considered for this study because it does not represent the stance of Chinese government. For example, “中国” [China] in “中国工商银行” [The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China] is not China as a country but as part of the title of an organisation. An error in the retrieval of the concordance lines of China with regular expression is “发展[[中国]]家” [developing countries] since the lexical item “发展[[中国]]家” includes “中国” and the concordance lines of “发展[[中国]]家” are thus retrieved as those of “中国”. Therefore, the concordance lines in which “发展[[中国]]家” occurs are removed. In the following example, “其他发展[[中 国]]家提高农业生产能力,有效应对粮食危机” [other developing countries raise their agricultural productivity to effectively cope with food crises], “中国” is two characters which constitute “发展[[中国]]家”, not referring to China anymore, and thus is not considered in this study. Another point worthy of mention is that the frequency of an appraisal epithet is counted within its tagged sub-systems. For example, “正确” [correct, correctly] is tagged with both “appreciation-attitude/positive” and “judgement-attitude/positive”. Within its context, seven cases of “正确” are found when it is an appreciation epithet and one case of it is identified as a judgement epithet. Therefore, its frequency is counted seven times as appreciation epithet and one time as judgement epithet. With a close reading of each concordance line, all these processes finally return 334 appraisal epithets for the Self-category and 189 for the Other-category and all these appraisal epithets are tagged at the third level of Appraisal System.

3.2.3.3

Illustration of Appraisal Epithet Tagging

Here examples are presented in each subcategory of Appraisal System to make it clear and easy to understand the tagging of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. For convenience, only those appraisal epithets in the Self-category are retrieved for the purpose of illustration. However, the tagging of the appraisal epithets in the Other-category follows the same process.

Appraisal Epithets Tagging in Engagement Within the sub-system of Engagement, there are another two sub-systems. They are monogloss, which recognises no dialogistic alternatives, and heterogloss, which accepts external voices. Within heterogloss, there are four types of subcategories, i.e., disclaim, proclaim, entertain, and attribute. Among these four subcategories, disclaim and proclaim are grouped into dialogic contraction while entertain and attribute are categorised as dialogic expansion. By dialogic contraction, it is meant that the writer/speaker closes down the space for dialogic alternatives when referring

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the utterances and viewpoints of external voices while dialogic expansion is used to denote that the writer/speaker opens up the dialogic space for alternative positions (Martin and White 2005: 103). Each of the four subcategories of Engagement has their own subcategories. As for disclaim, there are two sub-categories, i.e., deny, counter. Proclaim covers the sub-category of concur, of pronounce, and of endorse. Entertain has no sub-category while attribute has two sub-categories, namely, acknowledge and distance. All the appraisal epithets within the Engagement system are tagged at the level of the sub-category with an indicator whether they are dialogic contraction or dialogic expansion. Extract 3.1 ST … [[中国]] 从不 参加 核军备 竞赛, 也 从不 在 国外 部署 核武器… TT … China has never participated in any nuclear arms race and never deployed nuclear weapons abroad… Extract 3.2 ST … 对 此, [[中国]] 当然 不 能 接受… TT … This is certainly unacceptable to China… Extract 3.3 ST … 中国 的 发展 道路, 根本 任务, 对外 政策 和 历史 文化 传统, 决定 [[中国]] 必然 实行 防御 性 的 国防 政策… TT … The pursuit of a national defense policy which is defensive in nature is determined by China’s development path, its fundamental aims, its foreign policy, and its historical and cultural traditions… In Extract 3.1, “从不” [never], as an Engagement epithet in “[[中国]]从不参加 核军备竞赛” [China has never participated in any nuclear arms race], introduces an alternative position “[[中国]]参加核军备竞赛” [China participated in nuclear arms race] and then presents itself as a rejecting response to deny it. It is thus regarded as a denial appraisal epithet and is tagged with “deny-disclaim-contraction-engagement”. In Extract 3.2, “当然” [certainly] presents a highly warrantable position, which is generally shared by the Chinese government and people, that “[[中国]]不能接 受” [This is unacceptable to China]. It is heteroglossic in that it construes in the text a putative audience who agrees with the writer/speaker and displays their position as the universally shared value or belief in the dialogistic context. And also in this way, it excludes alternative voices, dissident voices and positions in particular, which contradict the purportedly generally agreed value or belief. “当然” is therefore tagged with “concur-proclaim-contraction-engagement”.

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In Extract 3.3, “必然” [be bound to] indicates, though to a less degree, that it is but one of many voices and thus leaves some space for other possibilities. It represents the authorial voice, which signals recognition that some of the audience might not hold precisely the same viewpoint as the writer/speaker, in this case, the Chinese government. At the same time, it also reduces the possibility that those external voices it entertains are the ones that fully reject its stance. It thus works to construe a heteroglossic ground by which the writer/speaker is highly committed to a stance while also being ready for potential rejections.

Appraisal Epithets Tagging in Attitude In the sub-system of Attitude, there are three sub-categories, i.e., affect, judgement, and appreciation. “The source of affect is of course conscious participants, including persons, human collectives and institutions….And the behaviour of these conscious participants is the target of judgement. Appreciation on the other hand targets things, whether concrete or abstract, material or semiotic” (Martin and White 2005: 59). As for affect, there are only two collocates of the Self-items, occurring once for each, and no affect epithet for the Other-items is found in the whole corpus. To some extent, it indicates that very few affect resources are usually used in Chinese political discourse, which is different from judgement and appreciation resources with respect to the frequency. Extract 3.4 is an example to illustrate affect epithet and the ways it is tagged. Extract 3.4 ST … 顺应 了 这 一 世界 发展 大势, [[中国]] 乐 见 并 支持 越来越 多 的 发展 中国家 改变 自身 命运, 也 乐 见 和 支持 发达国家 … TT … China is glad to see and supports more and more developing countries in changing their destiny, and it is also glad to see and supports the developed countries … Here in this Extract, “乐” [glad] is an affect epithet, which shows the happiness of the appraiser “中国” [China] and its polarity is obviously positive. It is thus tagged with “happiness-affect-attitude/positive” in this context. As for judgement, it has two sub-systems. One is social esteem, which is based on three criteria, i.e., normality, capacity, and tenacity. The other is social sanction, which is judged on the basis of veracity and propriety. Here are some examples retrieved from the corpus to illustrate the different parameters for organising judgement epithets. Extract 3.5 ST … 新 [[中国]] 在 十分 困难 的 情况 下, 不畏强暴, 被迫 进行 保家卫国 的 正 义 战争, 并 取得 了 伟大 的 胜利…

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TT … In spite of great difficulties, New China, defying brute force, was compelled to wage a just war to defend the homeland and achieved a great victory… Extract 3.6 ST … 1999年 、 2001年 和 2002年 [[中国]] 成功 发射 三 艘 无 人 试验 飞船, 标 志 着 中国 已 突破 载人 飞船 的 基本 技术… TT … In 1999, 2001, and 2002, China successfully launched in succession three experimental unmanned spaceships, marking a breakthrough for China in mastering basic manned spaceship technology… Extract 3.7 ST … [[中国]] 深入 参与 和 推动 世界贸易组织 多哈 回合 谈判, 努力 维护 多 边 贸易 体制 的 权威性… TT … China has actively participated in and promoted the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round talks, and strives to safeguard the authority of the multilateral trading… “困难” [difficult] in Extract 3.5 is an appraisal epithet representing how special situation that China was enduring. It is related to the usuality of how the participant behaves, i.e., how special the behaviour of the participant is. It is thus tagged with “normality-judgement-attitude/negative”. In Extract 3.6, “成功” [successfully] displays China’s capability to launch three unmanned spaceships, which is regarded as a technical breakthrough in spaceship technology in China. It is used to illustrate the ability of the participant, i.e., how capable China is. “成功” is thus tagged in this context with “capability-judgement-attitude/positive”. In Extract 3.7, “深入” [deeply] presents China as resolute to participate in and promote the Doha Round talks. It concerns the inclination of the participant or in another way, how resolute China is. Therefore, “深入” is tagged with “tenacity-judgement-attitude/positive”. However, the above three examples are those that concern shared values within the social networks such as family, friends, which is usually governed by social morals. This is different from shared values governed by edicts, regulations, and laws, against which will result in penalties and punishments. Here are some examples to illustrate judgements of social sanction. Extract 3.8 ST … [[中国]] 真诚 期待 同 世界 各国 并肩 携手, 实现 共同 发展 繁荣… TT … China sincerely hopes to work with other countries to realize common development and prosperity…

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Extract 3.9 ST … [[中国]] 为 受 援 国 无偿 提供 计算机, 教学 用具, 文体 用品 等 大批 教 学 设备 物资, 帮助 受 援 国 建设 大学 网络 平台 和 远程… TT … China provided large amounts of free educational facilities and materials to the recipient countries, including computers, teaching tools, stationery and sports equipment, and established university online education networks… In Extract 3.8, “真诚” [sincerely], one of the appraisal epithets in the Selfcategory, represents China in a positive way. It states China’s hope as a sincere one to work together with the rest of the world to reach common development and prosperity. This is to say China is sincere as an institutional collective personified participant, or the manner of its behaviour hoping to work with other countries for a better world. Here “真诚” concerns veracity, i.e., it shows how honest the participant is. As a result, it is tagged with “veracity-judgement-attitude/positive”. “无偿” [free of charge] in Extract 3.9 is positively picturing China in terms of the manner of its behaviour, the manner in which China provided educational facilities and materials to other countries for free. It is related to propriety, i.e., how far the participant or their behaviour is beyond reproach. “无偿” is thus a judgement epithet to praise China for its generous help in this context and is tagged with “propriety-judgement-attitude/positive”.

Appraisal Epithets Tagging in Graduation The Graduation system has two sub-categories: force and focus. Within the subsystem of force, two categories are classified and they are quantification and intensification. In the category of quantification, there are three sub-categories: number, mass, extent; and in the category of intensification, there are two sub-categories: quantity and process. Force epithets are employed to assess attitudinal meaning as to degree of intensity and as to amount. For those resources that are not scalable to degree but prototypicality, they are categorised as focus epithets. Extracts from 3.10 to 3.14 are retrieved to illustrate the ways the epithets of force are tagged, and Extracts 3.15 and 3.16 are chosen to show the tagging of the epithets of focus. Extract 3.10 ST …前进 的 步伐. 展望 [[祖国]] 未来, 前景 无限 美好… TT … Looking into the future of our motherland, we see a vista of limitless promise… Extract 3.11 ST … 改革 开放 30 周年, 改革 开放 使 [[中国]] 发生 了 历史性 的 巨大 变化. 我国 仍 处于 并 将…

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TT … It has been 30 years since China introduced the reform and opening up policy, which has brought about great historic changes to the country… Extract 3.12 ST … [[中国]] 一贯 奉行 睦邻友好 政策, 主张 在 和平共处 五 项 原则 基础 上, 通过 平等 协商, 公平 合理 地 解决… TT … China consistently adheres to the policy of friendly relations with its neighbouring States, and strives for fair and equitable solution in respect of disputes of territorial sovereignty and maritime delimitation by way of negotiations on the basis of equality and the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence… As briefly mentioned above, there are three modes of quantification to graduate other appraisal resources, i.e., number, mass, and extent. As is shown in Extract 3.10, “无限” [limitless] indicates an imprecise calculation of number with an up-scaling graduation of China’s future. Therefore the Graduation epithet “无限” is tagged with “number-quantification-force/up-scale”. In Extract 3.11, “巨大” [great] is upscaling the changes that China has experienced in terms of an imprecise reckoning of mass. It is thus tagged with “mass-quantification-force/up-scale”. As for “一贯” [consistently] appearing in Extract 3.12, it is graduating in an up-scaling manner China’s adherence to the policy of friendly relations with its neighbouring countries. It implies an extent with respect to time in that it emphasises that China adheres to this policy all the time. Thus, “一贯” is tagged here with “extent-quantificationforce/upscale”. Extract 3.13 ST … [[中国]] 十分 重视 对 行政 机关 行使 权力 的 规范, 依法 加强 对 行政 权 力 行使 的 监督, 确保 行政 机关 依法 正确 行使 权力… TT … China attaches great importance to the regulation of the administrative organs ‘ execution of their power, strengthens the supervision of the execution of administrative power in accordance with the law, and ensures the correct execution of administrative power by administrative organs… Extract 3.14 ST … 2011年 至 2012年, [[中国]] 与 世界 卫生 组织 密切 配合, 先后 派出 15 名 专家 赴 纳米比亚, 尼日利亚, 埃塞俄比亚 和 巴基斯坦… TT … From 2011 to 2012, China worked closely with the WHO and dispatched 15 experts to Namibia, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Pakistan to help control the spread of poliomyelitis…

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In Extract 3.13, “十分” [great] implies a degree of intensity to graduate in an upscaling way China’s emphasis on the regulation of the governments’ use of power. The way China emphasises such regulation is up-scaled by adding the appraisal epithet “十分”, and by doing so, the image of China is also positively presented. Therefore, “十分” is tagged with “quality-intensification-force/up-scale”. “密切” [closely] in Extract 3.14 is adverbially modifying the verbal process of “配合” [work with] with an up-scaling tone. By intensifying China’s cooperation with the WHO by the use of the appraisal epithet “密切”, the degree of such judgement resource to appraise China is upwardly graduated. “密切” is thus tagged with “process-intensificationforce/up-scale”. For the sub-system of focus, there is no further division according to Martin and White (2005). So here the appraisal epithets of focus are grouped only into sharpen or soften, which is similar to up-scale or down-scale in the sub-system of force (Martin and White 2005: 138). Extracts 3.15 and 3.16 are the examples of the appraisal epithets of sharpening focus and softening focus. Extract 3.15 ST … 中国共产党 领导 的 人民 民主 革命 胜利 的 第一 个 重要 成果 就 是, 将 帝国主义 列强 赶 出 了 中国, 从而 为 [[中国]] 实现 真正 的 独立自主 扫 清 了 道路… TT … The first important achievement of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which led the Chinese people to victory in the people’s democratic revolution, was to drive the imperialist invaders out of China, paving the way for China to realize real independence… Extract 3.16 ST … 目前, [[中国]] 已 初步 形成 了 门类 齐全, 结构 相对 合理, 具有 一定 配 套 性 和 完整性 的 食品 质量 安全 标准 体系… TT … Now, a food quality and safety standard system covering all categories, featuring a relatively rational structure and being fairly complete, has taken initial shape in China… By using “真正” [real] in Extract 3.15, China’s independence is sharpened in that the independence that China attains is presented as a prototypical independence. Therefore “真正” is tagged with “focus-graduation/sharpen”. In Extract 3.16, “初 步” [initial] indicates that the food quality and safety standard system that China has is not a complete system but only an initial form of such system. That is to say, China’s food quality and safety standard system that “初步形成” [takes initial shape] is not the prototypical system of this kind and thus softens its prototypicality. “初 步” is thus tagged with “focus-graduation/soften”.

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Of note is that all the appraisal epithets appearing in this study are tagged at the fourth level of Appraisal System as is shown in the above examples. Nevertheless, only the third-level tagging is considered in this book. For example, “当然” is tagged with “concur-proclaim-contraction-engagement”, but in this book, “当然” is only considered as a proclaim epithet within the sub-system of Engagement, regardless of the tagging of concur. “无偿” is read as a judgement epithet within the subsystem of Attitude, no matter whether it is regarded as a propriety, veracity, tenacity, capacity, or normality. This is the same case for “密切” as a Graduation epithet. It is only taken into account as force, no matter whether it is tagged as intensification or quantification. All these processes lay strong foundations for the further analysis of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse.

3.2.4 Data Analysis with Comparison Models The Statistical Package of the Social Science (hereafter SPSS) is used to analyse the data in order to conduct significance test with different parameters for the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. The comparison models for the significance test are illustrated in Figs. 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 and 3.11.

Fig. 3.8 The overall comparison model

Fig. 3.9 The comparison model for engagement

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Fig. 3.10 The comparison model for attitude

Fig. 3.11 The comparison model for graduation

Figure 3.8 is an overview of the comparison model used for this book. As is shown in this figure, this study is to compare the ways in which appraisal epithets are translated between the Self-category and the Other-category in a holistic framework. Specifically, comparisons are carried out between Engagement, Attitude, and Graduation in these two country categories one by one. The data analyses of the three subsystems are conducted separately for the sake of the convenience of research presentation. It has to be emphasised again that Engagement, Attitude, and Graduation are three interacting domains and operate simultaneously. Figure 3.9 illustrates the comparison model for the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Engagement. Here PC refers to the positive collocates and NC to the negative collocates of these dialogistical contractive or expansive epithets. Comparisons are conducted between the ways that those expansive epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories are translated, and in more detailed way, between

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those expansive epithets in both categories with positive collocates and between those expansive epithets in both categories with negative collocates. Similar steps are followed to compare those dialogistical contractive epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories. As for the analysis of the English translation of the Attitude epithets shown in Fig. 3.10, comparisons are conducted at the level of two sub-systems with a parameter of polarity, i.e., positive versus negative. The affect epithets are disregarded because there are only two cases of affect epithets in the Self-category and no affect epithet is found in the Other-category. It is thus not necessary to have the comparative analysis at this level. Finally, the English translation of the whole list of the positive Attitude epithets is also compared with the English translation of their negative counterparts in order to reveal whether the polarity of the appraisal epithets influences their translation. The most complicated comparison is about the English translation of the Graduation epithets, as is shown in Fig. 3.11. Here Up and Down refer to up-scale and down-scale, respectively. PC represents the positive collocates and NC is the short form of the negative collocates. Firstly, the English translations of the up-scaling force epithets with positive collocate are compared between the Self-category and the Other-category and the English translations of the up-scaling force epithets with negative collocate are also compared between the Self-category and the Other-category. Secondly, the ways that the down-scaling force epithets with positive collocate are translated are compared between the Self-category and the Other-category. For the down-scaling force epithets with negative collocate, their translations are compared as well between the Self-category and the Other-category. Thirdly, similar steps are followed to compare the English translations of the focus epithets with the parameters of the polarity of their collocates.

3.3 Summary This chapter offers a combined theoretical framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model, and the methodology for our study in this book. It explains the ways in which the combined theoretical framework and methodology help identify the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse and reveal the variations of the stance towards China and other countries. It also illustrates in detail the procedure of data collection and the comparison models for data analysis.

References

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References Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, and Tony McEnery. 2013. Discourse analysis and media attitudes: the representation of Islam in the British press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bednarek, Monika 2006. Evaluation in media discourse: Analysis of a newspaper corpus. London and New York: Continuum. Bednarek, Monika. 2008. Emotion talk across corpora. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cheng, Zhenqiu [程镇球]. 2002. Collections of papers on translation [翻译论文集]. Beijing [北 京]: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press [外语研究与研究出版社]. Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and power. London: Longman. Gries, Stefan Th. 2013. “50-something years of work on collocations: What is or should be next….” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 18 (1): 137–166. Hu, Kai Bao [胡开宝]. 2011. Introduction to corpus-based translation studies [语料库翻译学概 论]. Shanghai [上海]: Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press [上海交通大学出版社]. Hua, Chun Yu. [华春雨]. 2012. “China in the White Paper–Scanning the White Paper of Chinese the government in 2011 [白皮书里说中国–2011年中国政府白皮书工作扫描].” Xinhua News Agency [新华通讯社]. Accessed on 6 March, 2016. http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/201201/04/c_111370274.htm. Martin, James Robert, and David Rose. 2003. Working with discourse: Meaning beyond the clause. London: Continuum. Martin, James Robert, and Peter White. 2005. The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Munday, Jeremy, and Mei Fang Zhang. 2015. Introduction. Target 27 (3): 325–334. Paltridge, Brian. 2012. Discourse analysis: An introduction. London: Bloomsbury. Peng, Xuan Wei [彭宣维], Xiao Jun Yang [杨晓军], and Zhong Qing He [何中清]. 2012. “Chinese-English parallel corpus of appraisal meanings [汉英对应评价意义语料库].” Technology Enhanced Foreign Language Education [外语电化教学] (05): 3–10. Thompson, Geof, and Susan Hunston. 2006. “Evaluation in text.” In Encyclopedia of language & linguistics, edited by Keith Brown, 305–312. Oxford: Elsevier. van Dijk, Teun A. 1993. “Principles of critical discourse analysis.” Discourse & Society 4 (2): 249–283. van Dijk, Teun A. 1995. “Discourse semantics and ideology.” Discourse & Society 6 (2):243–289. van Dijk, Teun A. 1998. Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage. van Dijk, Teun A. 2006. “Discourse and manipulation.” Discourse & Society 17 (3): 359–383. Wodak, Ruth (ed.). 1989. Language, power and ideology: Studies in political discourse, vol. 7. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Xiao, Richard. 2010. “How different is translated Chinese from native Chinese? A corpus-based study of translation universals.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15 (1): 5–35. Yun, Susan Xu. 2015. “The translators’ positioning in an institutional setting: A Singapore perspective.” Babel 61 (1): 93–109. Zhang, Chuan Neng [张传能]. 2010. Work report of the national congress of the communist party of China in the New Era [新时期中国共产党全国代表大会报告研究]. PhD thesis [博士学位 论文], The Party School of the Central Committee of CPC [中共中央党校].

Chapter 4

Translation of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse

This chapter is mainly concerned with the ways in which the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse are translated and the frequency of different translation strategies applied to the appraisal epithets in the sub-categories of Appraisal System and in both the Self- and the Other-categories. Specifically, we will firstly present and discuss the distribution and the frequency of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse within each sub-category of the semantic framework of Appraisal System and in both the Self- and the Other-categories. We then present in detail how these appraisal epithets are translated into English, including the ways how these appraisal epithets are translated and the frequencies of translation strategies that are applied to them. The polarity of the appraisal epithets and the polarity of their collocates are also taken into account in the analysis of the English translation of these appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse.

4.1 Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse Through a careful and step-by-step retrieval procedure described in Chapter three, all appraisal epithets which meet the requirements are retrieved from the corpus of Chinese political discourse built for this study. The frequencies of these appraisal epithets in different categories are also generated.

4.1.1 Distribution of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse The distribution of the appraisal epithets in different sub-systems for both the Selfcategory and the Other-category is displayed in detail in Table 4.1. All the numbers are calculated three times to avoid miscalculation, though this is largely time-consuming © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Li and K. Hu, Reappraising Self and Others, Corpora and Intercultural Studies 6, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9488-5_4

85

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4 Translation of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse

Table 4.1 Distribution of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse Appraisal System Engagement

Attitude

Graduation

Self

Others

15

14

Contraction

Disclaim Proclaim

4

5

Expansion

Entertain

5

4

Attribute

0

0

Affect

2

0

Judgement

74

32

Appreciation

126

47

up-scale

168

99

down-scale

12

12

sharpen

7

5

soften

8

4

Force Focus

because of the complex process of categorising the appraisal epithets in the different sub-categories of Appraisal System. As can be seen in Table 4.1, most appraisal epithets are congregated within the sub-system of judgement, appreciation, and force. It can also be easily seen that there is no attribute epithet for both the Self- and the Other-categories and there is no affect epithet for the Other-category. And from the values in Engagement, it seems there is no much difference between the Self-category and the Other-category. This is illustrated in Fig. 4.1. It shall be pointed out that firstly, two sub-categories are used to distinguish the Engagement epithets, namely, contraction and expansion, though there are some few boarding members, particularly between proclaim and entertain. For example, “必须” [must] can be either an entertain epithet, which is in expansion category as “must” in English is marked as an entertain resource in Martin and White (2005: 98), or a pronounce epithet in contraction category. In the genre of political discourse,

Fig. 4.1 Distribution of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse

4.1 Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse

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however, particularly in Chinese political discourse, the king of highly authoritative documents, “必须” stands for an order and strong willing as is in “作为一个拥 有13亿多人口的发展中大国, [[中国]]必 必须立足国内增加能源供给” [As a large developing country with a population of over 1.3 billion, China must rely on itself to increase the energy supply steadily to satisfy such demands], in which it is dialogistical contractive. The categorisations of these few bordering members are finally solved with discussions between the two annotators, on the basis of the specific context of each involved epithet. The annotation of the appraisal epithets in this study is largely within the Chinese context, though sometimes contradicts with the annotation of their English counterparts. As Martin and White (2005: 52) states, the list of appraisal resources in their work should not be treated as a dictionary that can be mechanically applied in any text analysis. Secondly, within the Graduation epithets, force is divided with the parameter of up-scale and down-scale and focus is divided with the parameter of sharpen and soften. Such division is used as the basis for further comparisons when dealing with the English translation of the Graduation epithets. Thirdly, the values in Table 4.1 are the numbers of the appraisal epithets naturally occurring in each sub-category within Appraisal System and in the Selfand the Other-categories.

4.1.2 Frequency of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse The frequency of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse is calculated for each sub-category of Appraisal System and for both the Self- and the Othercategories, which is displayed in Table 4.2. Figure 4.2 also illustrates the distribution of the appraisal epithets in each sub-system between the Self-category and the Othercategory. As can be seen from Table 4.2, the polarity of the appraisal epithets is added for each category, which is another parameter for further comparisons when dealing with the English translation of the appraisal epithets. It is clearly demonstrated that data are congregated within the sub-system of appreciation, force, and judgement. As for the percentage that the frequency of the appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories accounts for in each sub-category of Appraisal System, the data in Fig. 4.2 show that the appraisal epithets with positive polarity in the Self-category account for a larger share in most sub-categories of Appraisal System, in contrast to their counterparts in the Other-category. However, it does not mean that the appraisal epithets with negative polarity in the Self-category are less than those in the Othercategory. For example, there are more negative appraisal epithets in the Self-category than in the Other-category in the sub-system of appreciation. These data indicate in a sense that the Self-items rather than the Other-items are the focus of Chinese political discourse, and in another sense that the Self-items are not necessarily profiled in a positive way.

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Table 4.2 Frequency of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse Appraisal System Engagement

Contraction

Expansion

negative

121

43

Proclaim

positive

98

19

negative

5

38

positive

214

18

negative

8

4

positive

0

0

Entertain

Affect Judgement Appreciation

Graduation

Force

negative

0

0

positive

2

0

negative

0

0

positive

877

69

negative

18

45

positive

1129

96

negative

108

61

positive

1877

206

negative

138

189

positive

42

8

negative

34

16

up-scale

positive

82

8

negative

1

3

down-scale

positive

49

5

negative

7

9

up-scale down-scale

Focus

Others 42

positive

Attribute Attitude

Self 65

Disclaim

Fig. 4.2 Distribution of the appraisal epithets between Self- and Other-categories

4.1 Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse

89

It is necessary to provide an explanation about the polarity and the way it is set up for a better understanding. There are differences between the polarity of the appraisal epithets in the Attitude system and the polarity of those in the systems of Engagement and Graduation. For the polarity of the Attitude epithets, they are judged with two standards, depending on whether the Attitude epithet is inscribed or infused. If an Attitude epithet is inscribed, which means the Attitude epithet itself can display an obviously positive or negative polarity, this polarity is the polarity of the Attitude epithet that is taken into account in this study and the frequency of the Attitude epithet with this polarity is calculated accordingly and illustrated in the table. For example, “清醒” [clearly] in “[[中国]]清醒认识到气候变化带来的严峻 挑战” [China is clearly aware of the challenges brought about by climate change] is an inscribed judgemental epithet, exhibiting a clearly positive polarity to profile China without taking into account the influence of its collocates. It is thus tagged as positive and calculated once for this occurrence. If an Attitude epithet is an infused one, it means that the Attitude epithet under investigation can be either positive or negative in different contexts, largely depending on the polarity of its collocates. The polarity of this Attitude epithet has thus to be decided by analysing the polarity of its collocates. For example, “重大” [big, major, great, etc.] is considered as an infused epithet, which means its polarity is being influenced by its collocates. When it collocates with positive lexical items like “文 化惠民工程” [cultural projects benefiting the people], it is considered as positive. And its polarity is regarded as negative if it co-occurs with negative words such as “ 问题” [problem]. Another interesting example in the Other-category is the case of “ 成功” [successfully]. In most cases, “成功” [successful, successfully] is a positive appraisal epithet. However, in the concordance line “[[美国]]国家安全局2012年 夏季成功侵入了联合国总部的内部视频电话会议设备, 并破解了加密系统” [In the summer of 2012, the NSA succeeded in breaking into the UN video conference system and cracking its encrypted system], “成功” is tagged as negative in that it appraises the United States in a negative way by presenting the illegal act of the United States to access to UN video conference system. Unlike Attitude, the polarity of the appraisal epithets in both Engagement and Graduation refers to the polarity of the collocates of the appraisal epithets. Some standards are adhered to when the polarity of the collocates are decided. Firstly, if the collocate of an appraisal epithet in these two appraisal sub-systems is an inscribed lexical item that displays its polarity of either positivity or negativity without being influenced by its co-occurring texts, its polarity is tagged as the polarity of the appraisal epithet. This can be illustrated by the example of the Engagement epithet “必将” in “我们的[[祖国]]必将更加繁荣富强” [our motherland will become stronger and more prosperous]. Here “繁荣富强”, as the collocate of “必 将”, shows a positive polarity, and “必将” is thus counted positive for once. Secondly, if the collocate of an appraisal epithet in the two appraisal sub-systems is an infused lexical item, which means that its polarity is not decided by itself, but projected as a joint semantic effect of its co-occurrence with its collocates. For example, in the concordance line “[[中国]]将努力解决好能源问题” [The Chinese government will strive to address the energy problem properly], “努力” [make efforts,

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strive] is an inscribed judgemental epithet with a positive polarity, and at the same time it is also an up-scaling force epithet because it is used to appraise China by intensifying its efforts to solve its energy problem. In this case in which “努力” is a force epithet, its polarity has to rely on the polarity of its collocate “解决”. In corpus linguistics (e.g., Stubbs 1996; Wei 2002), “解决” [address, solve] is encoded with a negative semantic prosody because it more frequently collocates with negative lexical items in the larger proportion of occurrences. However, “解决” in this study is considered as positive in that it, together with its negative collocate “问题” [problem] as a whole, presents a positive joint semantic effect since the problem has been or is about to be solved. “努力” in this case is thus counted as positive and its frequency is calculated for once as a positive force epithet. It is shown in Table 4.2 that there are both positive and negative appraisal epithets in each sub-category of Appraisal System for both the Self- and the Other-items, except the sub-system of attribute, in which both the Self- and the Other-categories do not cover any appraisal epithet, and the sub-system of affect, in which only the Self-category has two positive appraisal epithets. Because of few or none occurrences of these two sub-systems, it is meaningless to compare the Self-category and the Other-category on the aspects of affect and attribute sub-systems and thus these two sub-systems are not to be taken into account further in this study. It can also be identified from this table that the frequency of the appraisal epithets displays two trends. One is that in terms of positive polarity, the frequency of the appraisal epithets in all sub-systems for the Self-items is larger compared with the number of occurrences of the appraisal epithets for the Other-items. But it does not necessarily mean that the frequency of the negative appraisal epithets in all subcategories of Appraisal System for the Self-items is less than that of their counterparts for the Other-items. The other trend is that in terms of the Self-category, the frequency of the positive appraisal epithets is larger than that of the negative appraisal epithets in all appraisal sub-systems except in the sub-system of disclaim which often denies the negative appraisal epithets, thus also profiling a positive Self. Yet it again does not necessarily mean that the frequency of the appraisal epithets for the Other-items shows a reverse tendency. Just the opposite, more negative appraisal epithets for the Other-items are graduated in a down-scaling manner while more positive appraisal epithets for the Self-items are toned down compared with those negative appraisal epithets that are down-scaled. This seems to be in contradiction with the Ideological Square of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation.

4.2 Translation of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse As discussed in the previous section, the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse are classified with two parameters, i.e., the parameter of the sub-categories of Appraisal System with a polarity, and the parameter of the dichotomy of the

4.2 Translation of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse

91

Self-category and the Other-category. The investigation of the English translation of the appraisal epithets is also in accordance with these classifications. Based on the detailed analysis of the parallel concordance lines of the appraisal epithets retrieved from the Chinese-English parallel corpus of political discourse, three types of translation strategies are identified: equivalent translation, zero translation, and shifting translation. Equivalent translation here means that an equivalent for a certain appraisal epithet is provided which also results in the same functional effect in the TTs. Zero translation means that there is no corresponding linguistic unit in the TTs for the appraisal epithet in the ST. In terms of shifting translation, there are three subtypes. The first type is that the TT provides a shifted lexical item, which is not considered as equivalent to the appraisal epithet in the ST, but leads to the same functional effect. For example, “美好” [good, bright] in “展望[[祖国]] 未来, 前景无限美好” [Looking into the future of our motherland, we see a vista of limitless promise] is rendered into “promise”, a noun form of “promising” but it achieves the same functional effect in the TT. The second subtype of shifting translation refers to translation in which an appraisal epithet in the ST is substituted with a lexical item in the TT that upgrades the degree of the appraisal meaning that the appraisal epithet conveys in the ST. It is thus coded as up-shifting translation in this study. For example, “大型” [large-scaled] is rendered into “leading” in the parallel concordance lines “成为[[中国]]大型复合肥生产基地之一” [has become a leading compound fertilizer producer in China]. The third subtype of shifting translation is the reversed version of the second subtype, which means that a lexical item is provided in the TT to correspond with the appraisal epithet in the ST, but at the same time down-scaling its appraisal meaning. It is called down-shifting translation afterwards. For example, “普遍” [generally] is shifted into “many”—an equivalent translation would be “most”—in the parallel concordance lines “[[中国]]地方政 府网站普遍设立了市长信箱” [Many local government websites in China have a municipal mayor’s mailbox]. Here, it has to be mentioned that the first subtype of the strategy of shifting translation is merged with the strategy of equivalent translation since both of them achieve an equivalent functional effect between the appraisal epithets in the STs and their corresponding units in the TTs. For the sake of the convenient presentation of the results, the English translations of the appraisal epithets in the different sub-categories of Appraisal System are displayed accordingly. But it shall be stressed that Appraisal System is a simultaneously interactive framework, which means that though the appraisal epithets in each sub-system are analysed separately, they actually co-project a whole picture of appraisal meaning in the Chinese political discourse and their translations. It starts with the presentation of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Attitude system since Attitude resources are at the centre of Appraisal System to profile appraisal meaning and forge the authorial stances. The English translations of the appraisal epithets in the sub-systems of both Engagement and Graduation are then followed for further discussion.

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4.2.1 Translation of Attitude Epithets As is mentioned in Chapter three, there are three sub-categories in the Attitude system, i.e., affect, judgement, and appreciation. From Tables 4.1 and 4.2, it is known that the appraisal epithets in both judgement and appreciation are among the top in terms of both the number and the frequency. The English translation of the Attitude epithets thus deserves a large space for the detailed analysis. The results are presented one sub-system after another in the order of affect, judgement, and appreciation.

4.2.1.1

Translation of Affect Epithets

Though there is no affect epithet for the Other-category, it is necessary to present the results of the English translation of the affect epithets in order to show the whole picture of the English translation of the Attitude epithets. Table 4.3 displays the ways how affect epithets are translated. “T” is used to stand for “translation” in Table 4.3. So Equivalent T refers to Equivalent Translation and Zero T refers to Zero Translation. This is the same case to Up-shifting T and Down-shifting T. “Pos” and “Neg” are employed to represent the “positive” and the “negative” polarity of the appraisal epithets, respectively. This is applied to all the tables in this study. Table 4.3 shows that the two positive affect epithets in the Self-category are translated through the equivalent translation strategy. Equivalents are provided in the TTs to correspond to these two positive affect epithets, and thus positive appraisal meanings for Self are kept in the TT. This can be illustrated by Extract 4.1. Extract 4.1 ST … 经过 灾难 的 洗礼, [[中国]] 人民 更加 成熟 自信 坚强 … TT … Passing these severe tests made the Chinese people more mature, more confident and stronger, and the great, indomitable and unyielding spirit of the Chinese… In the ST in Extract 4.1, “自信” [confident], an affect epithet that is tagged with “security-affect-attitude/positive”, is used to positively appraise Chinese people, a Table 4.3 Translation of the affect epithets in Self-category Translation

Equivalent T

Up-shifting T

Down-shifting T

Zero T

Polarity Country

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Self

2

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Other

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Neg

4.2 Translation of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse

93

phrase related to the Self-items. It can be seen that it is translated into “confident” in the TT, which is considered as an equivalent in this context. It is thus clearly shown that the strategy of equivalent translation is adopted in order to reach the same or similar functional effect that Chinese people are positively appraised in the TT. The frequency of the use of this equivalent translation strategy is marked once for the translation of “自信”. As for the Other-category, no affect epithet has been identified from the corpus of Chinese political discourse and thus is not discussed further.

4.2.1.2

Translation of Judgement Epithets

The English translation of the judgement epithets is vitally important to illustrate the ways in which the attitudes, stances in the STs are reshaped in the TTs and the ideological relationships during the process of translation because judgement epithets are used to appraise the behaviours of the Self- or Other-items according to various normative principles. Based on the careful analysis and the classification of translation strategies mentioned above, Table 4.4 is drawn for the Self- and the Other-categories, respectively, to illustrate the English translation of the judgement epithets. Table 4.4 shows that most of the judgement epithets are translated with the equivalent translation strategy, accounting for 91 and 89% out of the total for the Selfcategory and the Other-category, respectively. It also shows that more positive judgement epithets for both the Self- and the Other-categories, compared with their negative counterparts, are dealt with by providing equivalents in the TTs. In terms of the equivalent translation strategy, however, the proportion of the positive judgement epithets to their negative counterparts in the Self-category is much larger than that of the judgement epithets in the Other-category. As for shifting translation, unlike the Self-category, there is no case of such type of translation strategy for the judgement epithets in the Other-category. In dealing with the judgement epithets with the shifting translation strategy, no case of the negative judgement epithet is identified and it is found that there are three more cases adopting the up-shifting translation strategy than using the down-shifting translation strategy. It can be seen that there is a striking contrast in terms of the zero translation strategy between the English translations of the positive and the negative judgement epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories. For the negative judgement epithets in the Self-category, there Table 4.4 Translation of the judgement epithets in Self- and Other-categories Translation

Equivalent T

Up-shifting T

Down-shifting T

Zero T

Polarity Country

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Self

796

18

6

0

3

0

72

0

63

39

0

0

0

0

6

6

Other

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4 Translation of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse

is zero case of the zero translation strategy, but there are seventy-two cases of positive judgement epithets in the Self-category, accounting for 8% of the total, that are translated with the strategy of zero translation. For the Other-category, there are six cases of both positive and negative judgement epithets that are not translated, i.e., the strategy of zero translation. Extracts 4.2 and 4.3 illustrate the different translation strategies for the judgement epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories and for the judgement epithets with both positive and negative polarity. Extract 4.2 ST … [[缅甸]] 妥善 应对 风灾, 加快 推进 “ 民主 路线图 “ … TT … Myanmar properly handled the disaster caused by the cyclone and promoted the “ road map to democracy “ at a faster pace … Extract 4.3 ST … 近代 [[中国]] 由于 国力 的 贫弱 和 封建 专制 政权 的 腐败 无能, 沦为 半 殖民地 半封建 社会, 包括 西藏 在内 的 中国 领土 遭到 西方 列强 的 侵略 和 … TT … In modern times, China was reduced to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society; Chinese territory, including Tibet, was subject to invasion and devastation by the big powers of the West; and China was confronted with the fate of being carved up and dismembered because of its weak national strength and the corruption and incompetence of feudal autocracy … In Extract 4.2, Myanmar, one of the Other-items, is positively appraised, where its behaviour dealing with cyclone is positively stated as a proper one. In Extract 4.3, China, the Self-item, is appraised in a negative manner, where its disastrous national situation and its deteriorated world status are pointed out. Both “妥善” [properly] and “贫弱” [weak] are judgement epithets in their own contexts, being tagged as “tenacity-judgement-attitude/positive” and “capacity-judgement-attitude/negative”. As can be seen from Extracts 4.2 and 4.3, both “妥善” and “贫弱” are translated with their English equivalents “properly” and “weak”, respectively, which means that the translators adopt the strategy of equivalent translation. Extract 4.4 ST … 坚决 维护 国家 主权, 安全, 发展 利益, 切实 维护 [[我国]] 公民 和 法人 海外 合法 权益… TT … We will resolutely safeguard China’s sovereignty, security and development interests, and fully protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens and legal persons overseas …

4.2 Translation of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse

95

Extract 4.5 ST … [[中国]] 将 努力 解决 好 能源 问题, 坚定不移 地 走 能源 可 持续 发展 道 路… TT … The Chinese government will strive to address the energy problem properly by following the sustainable road of energy development … Extract 4.6 ST … [[中国]]政府 努力 建立 职工 的 工伤 预防, 工伤 补偿 和 工伤 康复 相 结 合 的 工伤 保险 制度… TT … The Chinese government has made great efforts to establish an insurance system for work-related injuries that includes work-related injury prevention, compensation and recovery … Extract 4.7 ST … [[中国]] 将 努力 调整 经济 结构 和 产业 结构, 加快 先进 节能 环保 技术 的 应用, 促进 对外 … TT … China will try to readjust its economic and industrial structure, accelerate the application of advanced energy-conserving and environmental technologies, and promote more balanced development between foreign trade and resource conservation and environmental protection … It can be seen in Extract 4.4, “切实” [practically], the positive judgement epithet used to appraise China, is translated into “fully” in the TT. By doing so, the translator upgrades the degree of China’s act to protect the rights of the Chinese both at home and abroad in the TT. It thus is considered as an up-shifting translation. By contrast, the translation of “努力” into “try” in Extract 4.7 is regarded as a down-shifting translation. As is shown in Extracts 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7, “努力” is used in all these three cases to positively appraise China. It is translated with an equivalent translation strategy by providing its English equivalents “strive” and “make great efforts” in Extracts 4.5 and 4.6, respectively, since both “strive” and “make great efforts” in the TT can reach the same functional effect as “努力” does in the ST. However, in Extract 4.7, though the word “努力” is also tagged as “tenacity-judgement-attitude/positive” as it is in Extracts 4.5 and 4.6, it is translated into an English word “try” [attempt to do/get something]1 instead of “try hard” [make a lot of effort to do something], which

1 The

referential meanings of the English words within the quotation marks are from the online Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (http://www.ldoceonline.com/), unless otherwise stated.

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to some extent downgrades China’s tenacity to readjust its economic and industrial structure. Extract 4.8 ST … 墨西哥 总统 候选人 的 培尼亚 的 电子 邮件 曾 被 [[美国]] 国家 安全局 秘密 窃取, 其 内容 包括 了 培尼亚 准备 … TT … A classified document dated June 2012 shows that then Mexican presidential candidate Enrique Pena Nieto’s emails about naming some cabinet members were read by the NSA … Extract 4.9 ST … [[中国]] 坚决 反对 一切 形式 的 恐怖主义, 分裂主义 和 极端 … TT … China opposes all forms of terrorism, separatism and extremism … Both Extracts 4.8 and 4.9 are presented to illustrate the strategy of zero translation. In Extract 4.8, the negative judgement epithet “秘密” [secretly] is not re-expressed in the TT, which brings in an effect that the impropriety of the behaviour of NSA (the National Security Agency), one of the governmental institutes of the United States, is toned down. Similarly, a positive judgement epithet to appraise China “坚 决” [resolutely] is also ignored in the process of translation. The result from zero translation is that China’s determination in the ST to oppose the so-called three evils in all their manifestations, which is positively highlighted by using “坚决”, is reduced to certain degree in the TT.

4.2.1.3

Translation of Appreciation Epithets

Appreciation is another important part of the Attitude system. It is used to construe the value of things, which involves people’s reactions to them, the composition and the value of them such as the innovation, the authenticity of the things. In accordance with the classification of the translation strategies discussed above, Table 4.5 is drawn to illustrate the English translation of the appreciation epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories. Table 4.5 Translation of the appreciation epithets in Self- and Other-categories Translation

Equivalent T

Up-shifting T

Down-shifting T

Zero T

Polarity Country

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Self

1036

105

1

0

0

0

92

3

94

60

0

0

0

0

2

1

Other

4.2 Translation of Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse

97

As is shown in Table 4.5, similar to the English translation of the judgement epithets, the majority of the appreciation epithets are also translated into English with the equivalent translation strategy, which accounts for 92 and 98% out of total in the Self-category and the Other-category, respectively. One difference is that a slightly more portion of the epithets in the Other-category is translated with equivalent corresponding units in the TTs than those epithets in the Self-category. While there is only one case of the up-shifting translation strategy for a positive epithet in the Self-category, there is no case at all in terms of the down-shifting translation strategy for the appreciation epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories. As for zero translation, there is a large difference between the positive and the negative appreciation epithets in the Self-category with the positive epithets accounting for 97%. And there are two and one cases of the zero translation strategy for the positive and the negative appreciation epithets in the Other-category, respectively. Extracts 4.10 and 4.11 are retrieved to illustrate the use of different translation strategies for the appreciation epithets with different polarity and in both the Selfand the Other-categories. Extract 4.10 ST … [[库克群岛]] 政局 平稳 … TT … The Cook Islands maintained political stability … Extract 4.11 ST … [[中国]] 幅员 辽阔, 情况 复杂, 各地 发展 不 平衡 … TT … With a vast land, China faces complicated conditions and imbalanced development among different regions … In Extract 4.10, “平稳” [stable] is used in the ST to positively appraise the governance of the Cook Islands, an Other-item, by describing that its political governance is under stable circumstance, which is supposed to be beneficial to social development. In the TT, the first type of the shifting translation strategy is adopted to translate “平稳” into “stability”, the derivative noun form of “stable” for the sake of syntax, which also achieves the same functional effect as “平稳” creates in the ST. As is mentioned above, the first type of shifting translation is grouped into the category of equivalent translation since the use of this type of shifting translation also achieves the effect of equivalent translation. Thus, “平稳” in Extract 4.10 is counted once as a positive appreciation epithet in the category of equivalent translation. However, “复杂” [complicated] is a negative appreciation epithet in the ST in Extract 4.11 which is used to state that China’s situation or the situation that China faces is a complicated one to deal with and thus to appraise this situation in a negative way as is also implied by the following expression of “imbalanced development”. This

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negative appreciation epithet for the Self-item is translated into “complicated” with the strategy of equivalent translation. Extract 4.12 ST … 对于 一个 13亿 多 人口 的 国家 来说 意义 十分 重大, 为 [[中国]] 人民 过 上 幸福 美好 生活 打下 了 坚实 基础 … TT … For a country with more than 1.3 billion people, a nine-year consecutive growth in grain output was of particularly significant importance, as it laid a solid foundation for the Chinese people to live a happier and better life … Extract 4.12 illustrates an up-shifting translation strategy for an appreciation epithet in the Self-category. In Extract 4.12, “幸福” [happy], as a positive epithet, is to appraise a life that Chinese people live. Instead of translating it into “happy”, the translator used its comparative form “happier” in the TT to deal with it. In this way, the translator upgrades the degree of happiness that Chinese people experience in comparison with “幸福” in another concordance line “为实现国家富强和人民幸 福探索出了一条正确道路” [blazed a correct road toward national prosperity and a happy life for the people], which is also retrieved from the same corpus for this study, but translated into “happy” instead. The way that “幸福” is dealt with in Extract 4.12 is thus regarded as an up-shifting translation strategy and counted once for the up-shifting translation strategy. Extract 4.13 ST … 注意 发挥 生态 的 自我 修复 能力, 逐步 建成 [[我国]] 西部 牢固 的 绿色 生态 屏障 … TT … Great attention should be paid to the ecological self-regeneration capacity. We should connect these projects to form an ecological green belt in the western region … Extract 4.14 ST … 2005年 10月 8日 [[巴基斯坦]] 发生 7. 8 级 大 地震 后, 中国政府 先后 四 次 向 巴 提供 总价值 2673 万 美元 的 紧急 人道主义 援助 … TT … After an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale rocked Pakistan on October 8, 2005, the Chinese government sent emergency humanitarian aid worth US$26.73 million to that country … Both Extracts 4.13 and 4.14 show the use of the zero translation strategy for the appreciation epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories and the appreciation epithets with both positive and negative polarity, respectively. In Extract 4.13, “牢 固” [solid] is used to positively appraise the economical belt that China plans to

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build in its western region. However, no corresponding unit can be identified in the TT for the positive epithet “牢固”. It is thus regarded that the translator adopted a zero translation strategy in this example and thus counted once of zero translation for the positive appreciation epithet in the Self-category. In Extract 4.14, earthquake is modified by an appraisal epithet “大” [great, major, massive] to emphasise the degree of devastation of this earthquake. Even though “7.8 on the Richter scale” implies in a sense that this earthquake is not small, it is still conducive for a rhetorical effect to upgrade the devastating consequence of a big earthquake as what the native speakers of English use with similar expressions in the Corpus of Contemporary American English containing more than 520 million words, such as “the Cordon Caulle volcano in central Chile erupted two days after the great magnitude-9.5 earthquake of 22 May 1960 off the coast of Chile”, “A massive 8.9 earthquake strikes Japan, triggering a gigantic tsunami”, and “A major earthquake, measuring 7.4 on the Richter scale, hit Southern California early this morning”. However, there is no corresponding unit provided in the TT for this negative appreciation epithet, which means that a zero translation strategy is adopted by the translator. One case is therefore added to the frequency of the use of the zero translation strategy for the negative appreciation epithets in the Other-category.

4.2.2 Translation of Engagement Epithets Engagement epithets involve projecting value positions of the writer/speaker by denying, affirming, and acknowledging a possibility. In terms of the Engagement system, two sub-categories, i.e., contraction and expansion, are classified for further comparisons between the English translations of the epithets in these two subcategories within the Self-category and within the Other-category, respectively. The comparative analysis has also been conducted between the English translations of the contractive epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories and between the English translations of the expansive epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories.

4.2.2.1

Translation of the Engagement Epithets in Self-Category

Tables 4.6 illustrates the English translation of the Engagement epithets in the Selfcategory. Of note is that polarity in the table for the English translation of the Engagement epithets is the polarity of the collocates of these Engagement epithets. For example, if an Engagement epithet collocates with a negative lexical item, this epithet is described as a negative epithet in the discussion of the English translation of the Engagement epithets. Table 4.6 shows that the strategy of equivalent translation is the most frequently used one among all the four translation strategies for the appraisal epithets in both sub-categories of contraction and expansion. The portion of the use of equivalent translation for the epithets in contraction and expansion accounts for 81 and 99%,

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Table 4.6 Translation of the Engagement epithets in Self-category Translation

Equivalent T

Up-shifting T

Down-shifting T

Zero T

Polarity Dialogical Openness

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Contraction

129

106

0

9

4

0

30

11

Expansion

211

8

0

0

0

0

3

0

respectively. Compared with the English translation of the epithets in the sub-category of expansion, there are nine negative epithets that are translated with the up-shifting translation strategy and four positive epithets that are downgraded in the TTs. In terms of zero translation, the translators applied it to forty-one epithets from the category of contraction and three epithets from the category of expansion. As the table shows, the use of translation strategies for the epithets in expansion is totally unbalanced, with 0% of the up-shifting and the down-shifting translation strategies and only slightly over 1% of the zero translation strategy. As for the polarity, Table 4.6 shows that positive epithets cover a major portion out of the total in both categories of contraction and expansion and in all the four translation strategies, except the up-shifting translation strategy for the epithets in the category of contraction. Specifically, compared with the epithets in contraction, there is a huge contrast between the positive and the negative epithets in expansion with respect to the equivalent translation strategy. The English translation of the positive epithets in the category of expansion takes up 96% of the total use of the equivalent translation strategy. By contrast, the value is 54% in the category of contraction. All nine cases of up-shifting translation strategy are applied to the negative epithets in contraction while all four cases of down-shifting translation strategy are used for the positive epithets in contraction. It is also shown in the table that more positive epithets than negative ones in both contraction and expansion are translated with the zero translation strategy.

4.2.2.2

Translation of the Engagement Epithets in Other-Category

Tables 4.7 illustrates the English translation of the Engagement epithets in the Other-category. Similarly, the polarity in the table for the English translation of the Engagement epithets is the polarity of the collocates of these Engagement epithets. Table 4.7 Translation of the Engagement epithets in Other-category Translation

Equivalent T

Up-shifting T

Down-shifting T

Zero T

Polarity Dialogical Openness

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Contraction

54

46

0

0

0

2

7

34

Expansion

18

2

0

1

0

1

0

0

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Table 4.7 shows that most epithets in the Other-category still again are rendered into English through the strategy of equivalent translation with a percentage of 70 in contraction and a percentage of 91 in expansion. Unlike the epithets in the Selfcategory, there is no case of up-shifting translation strategy in the category of contraction but one case of up-shifting translation strategy in expansion. As for the downshifting translation strategy, there are two cases in contraction and one in expansion, and all of them are negative epithets. In terms of zero translation, there are forty-one cases in contraction while there is zero case in expansion. This in a sense explains the overwhelmingly large portion of the use of the equivalent translation strategy in the category of expansion. Table 4.7 also displays a rather different picture about the English translation of the Engagement epithets with different polarity, particularly the epithets in contraction. There are fewer cases of the positive epithets in the category of contraction, which accounts only 43% of the total, less than 50%, a smaller portion compared with the English translation of the positive epithets in contraction in the Self-category. One of the reasons is that there are more negative epithets in contraction that have been translated with the zero translation strategy. However, the English translation of the positive epithets in expansion still accounts for a large part of the total, particularly in terms of the equivalent translation strategy. By comparing the English translations of the Engagement epithets between the Self-category and the Other-category, it is identified that there are two major similarities and one big difference in the English translations of the Engagement epithets between the Self-category and the Other-category. One similarity is that the majority of the epithets in both the category of contraction and the category of expansion are provided with equivalent linguistic units in the TTs. This implies that the equivalent translation strategy is the most frequently adopted strategy by the translators when dealing with the Engagement epithets. The other similarity is that there are more cases of positive epithets than negative epithets in terms of the equivalent translation strategy. The contrastive difference is that there are more positive contraction epithets in the Self-category that are translated with the zero translation strategy, accounting for 74% out of the total, while there are more cases of zero translation strategy being applied to the negative contraction epithets in the Other-category, covering as high as 83%. Examples are extracted from the parallel corpus of Chinese political discourse to illustrate the English translation of the Engagement epithets. Extract 4.15 ST … 可以 肯定, 实现 了 全面 建设 小康 社会 的 目标, 我们 的 [[祖国]] 必将 更加 繁荣富强, 人民 的 生活 必将 更加 幸福 美好 … TT … We are sure that after attaining the objectives of building a well-off society in an all-round way, our motherland will become stronger and more prosperous, the people will live a better and happier life …

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Extract 4.16 ST … [[美国]] 司法部长 也 承认, 由于 少数 族 裔 选举权 受到 身份证 法 的 限 制, 使 部分 人 在 事实 上 被 剥夺 了 该 项 权利 … TT … The U.S. attorney general also acknowledged, as the rights to vote of some ethnic Americans were restricted by laws requiring proof of identity, some people are as a matter of fact stripped of such rights … Extracts 4.15 and 4.16 illustrate the application of the equivalent translation strategy to the two Engagement epithets in the Self-category and the Other-category, respectively. In the context of these two examples, “必将” [will] is regarded as an epithet in the sub-system of entertain and “也” [also] is recognised as a proclaim epithet. Both of them, one in expansion and one in contraction, are translated with the equivalent translation strategy. This can be seen in the extracts in which the corresponding equivalent units “will” and “also” are provided in the TTs. “必将” in Extract 4.15 presents a fact rather than a wish that China is certain to be stronger and more prosperous after achieving the objectives of building a well-off society in an all-round way. Extract 4.16 exhibits that a top-rank official, who is supposed to be supportive of the American administrative systems, also confesses that there are some drawbacks of the election system in the United States, which slims down the possibility of dialogistical interaction. The use of the equivalent translation strategy helps represent the appraisal meaning in the TT that “必将” and “也” convey in the STs. Extract 4.17 ST … 鉴于 各国 有 权 自主 选择 争端 解决 方式, [[中国]] 不 接受, 不 参与 菲 律宾 提起 的 仲裁 有 充分 的 国际法 依据 … TT … Based on the foregoing positions and by virtue of the freedom of every State to choose the means of dispute settlement, China’s rejection of and non-participation in the present arbitration stand on solid ground in international law … Extract 4.18 ST … [[中国]] 不 称霸, 不 参加 军事 集团, 不 谋求 势力 范围 … TT … China will never seek hegemony, nor will it join any military bloc or crave for any sphere of influence … Extract 4.19 ST … 建设 法治 [[中国]], 必须 深化 司法 体制 改革, 加快 建设 公正 高效 权威 的 社会主义 司法 制度, 维护 人民 权益 …

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TT … To build a China under the rule of law, we must uphold the unity of the rule of law, we will deepen reform of the judicial system, accelerate the building of a just, efficient and authoritative socialist judicial system to safeguard the people’s rights and interests … “不” [not] is tagged as “deny-disclaim-contraction-engagement” in Extracts 4.17 and 4.18, and it is dealt with by the translators with the up-shifting translation strategy, where “不接受” [not accept] is rendered into “rejection” and “不称霸” [not seek hegemony] into “never seek hegemony”. Such translation strategy is affirmed if it is compared with the translation of “不” in the parallel concordance lines “[[中 国]]不会与任何国家进行军备竞赛,不会对任何国家构成军事威胁” [China will not engage in any arms race or pose a military threat to any other country], where the strategy of equivalent translation is adopted. Though similar to Extract 4.18 in particular, “不” here in this parallel concordance lines is translated into “no” instead of a superlative form of negativity “never”, which means “not at any time”. By upgrading the degree of negativity in the TT, the translators again reduced the chance for dialogistical interaction. In contrast with the up-shifting translation strategy, Extract 4.19 is used to illustrate the use of the down-shifting translation strategy. “必须” [must] in this example is regarded as an epithet in the sub-category of proclaim. The down-shifting translation strategy is adopted to deal with this contraction epithet and it is translated into “will” rather than “must”, thus creating the impression that China’s wish to deepen the reform of its judicial system is less strong in the TT than it is in the ST. It thus opens a door for more dialogical interference. This is particularly evident if it is compared with the previous clause in the TT, which reads “we must uphold the unity of the rule of law”. Extract 4.20 ST … 与 世界 贸易 强国 相比, [[中国]] 出口 产业 仍 处于 全球 产业链 的 低 端 … TT … Compared with other world trade powers, China’s export industry remains at the low end of the global industrial chain … Extract 4.21 ST … 2008年, [[伊朗]] 核 问题 总体 仍然 陷于 僵局, 国际 社会 继续 努力 寻求 和平 解决 的 妥善 办法 … TT … In 2008, the Iranian nuclear issue remained in a stalemate. The international community made continued efforts to seek proper ways for its Peaceful settlement …

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“仍” [still] and “仍然” [still] in Extracts 4.20 and 4.21 are the epithets in the subcategory of disclaim and thus grouped into the category of contraction. Both of them are not provided with a corresponding linguistic unit in the TTs. It thus is concluded that they are dealt with by the translators’ adoption of the zero translation strategy. By doing so, the translators create a situation, to take Extract 4.20 for instance, that China’s export industry is at the low end of the global industrial chain, disregarding the implicit meaning “仍” conveys in the ST that China’s export industry has already been strong. The application of the zero translation strategy to these two contraction epithets deletes the presumption that “仍” implies in the ST to an extent.

4.2.3 Translation of Graduation Epithets Graduation functions to up-scale or down-scale the degree or the prototypicality of the appraisal resources in the other two sub-categories of Appraisal System, i.e., Attitude and Engagement. As mentioned in Chapter three, there are two sub-categories of the Graduation system, i.e., force and focus. Force is sub-divided into two sub-categories of up-scaling and downscaling and focus is sub-divided into two-sub-categories of sharpen and soften. The English translation of the Graduation epithets is discussed on the basis of these two sub-categories of the Graduation system and further on the basis of the sub-levels of these two sub-categories. Just like the discussion of the English translation of the Engagement epithets, it is necessary to point out that polarity in Tables 4.8, 4.9, 4.10, and 4.11 for the English translation of the Graduation epithets refers to the polarity of the collocates of these Graduation epithets. There are three levels of comparisons. One is the comparison between the frequencies of translation strategies adopted by the translators. Another is the comparison between the English translations of the up-scaling/sharpen Graduation epithets and Table 4.8 Translation of the force epithets in Self-category Translation

Equivalent T

Up-shifting T

Down-shifting T

Zero T

Polarity Scaling

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Up-scaling

1682

120

16

0

14

0

165

18

31

25

0

0

0

0

11

9

Down-scaling

Table 4.9 Translation of the focus epithets in Self-category Translation

Equivalent T

Up-shifting T

Down-shifting T

Zero T

Polarity Scaling

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Up-scaling

69

0

0

0

0

0

13

1

Down-scaling

34

7

0

0

0

0

15

0

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Table 4.10 Translation of the force epithets in Other-category Translation

Equivalent T

Up-shifting T

Down-shifting T

Zero T

Polarity Scaling

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Pos

Neg

Up-scaling

181

154

3

1

0

1

22

33

8

14

0

0

0

0

0

2

Down-scaling

Table 4.11 Translation of the focus epithets in Other-category Translation

Equivalent T

Up-shifting T

Down-shifting T

Zero T

Polarity Scaling

Pos

Pos

Pos

Pos

Neg

Neg

Neg

Neg

Up-scaling

8

1

0

0

0

0

0

2

Down-scaling

3

7

0

0

0

0

2

2

the down-scaling/soften Graduation epithets. The other is about the comparison between the English translations of the positive Graduation epithets and the negative Graduation epithets. When one level of comparison is being conducted, the other two levels are working as the sub-layers of that level of comparison.

4.2.3.1

Translation of the Graduation Epithets in Self-Category

As is mentioned in Sect. 4.1, the appraisal epithets in the sub-system of force account for a large part of the total in both the Self- or Other-categories. Force epithets are employed to grade appraisal meaning according to the measurements of intensity, amount. Based on the different parameters of the types of translation strategies, the polarity of the epithets, and the sub-categories of up-scaling and down-scaling, Tables 4.8 and 4.9 illustrate the English translations of the force epithets and the focus epithets in the Self-category. Table 4.8 displays three features of the English translations of the force epithets in the Self-category. Firstly, compared with other translation strategies, equivalent translation is the most frequently used one by the translators, accounting for 89% in the group of the up-scaling force epithets and 74% in the group of the down-scaling force epithets, respectively. Secondly, there are more cases of the up-scaling force epithets rather than the down-scaling ones in terms of each category of the translation strategies. This is also true in all categories of the force epithets in terms of polarity, except those that feature zero cases of the force epithets. The third one is that the frequency of the positive force epithets in the Self-category is larger than that of their negative counterparts in all categories, no matter whether it is up-scaling or downscaling, and no matter what translation strategy is applied to them. However, it seems that the ratio of the frequency of the negative force epithets to that of the positive force epithets in the sub-category of the down-scaling force epithets is larger than this type

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of ratio in the sub-category of the up-scaling force epithets in terms of all translation strategies. That is to say, there is a large difference between the English translations of the positive and the negative force epithets in the up-scaling sub-category and the frequency of the English translation of the positive force epithets in the up-scaling sub-category covers a larger part in terms of each translation strategy, accounting for 93, 100, 100, and 90% for the strategy of equivalent translation, up-shifting translation, down-shifting translation, and zero translation, respectively. Extracts are retrieved from the parallel corpus to explain the use of different translation strategies for both the Self- and the Other-categories. In order to be more representative, this presentation is arranged on the basis of whether it is up-scaling or down-scaling and in terms of polarity. This is important because the combination of the different polarities of positivity and negativity and the different polarities of up-scale and down-scale makes the appraisal meaning realised by the Graduation epithets rather complicated. The inclusion of another parameter of different translation strategies for the Graduation epithets with different polarities makes the re-realisation of appraisal meaning in the TTs even more complicated for analysis. Extract 4.22 ST … [[中国]] 成功 地 实行 了 人口 政策, 延迟 了 世界 总人口 … TT … China’s success in population control has retarded the expansion of the population of the world as a whole … Extract 4.23 ST … 当前, 互联网 安全 问题 日益 突出, 成为 各国 普遍 关切 的 问题, [[中国]] 也 面临 着 严重 的 网络 安全 威胁… TT … Internet security problems are pressing nowadays, and this has become a problem of common concern in all countries. China also faces severe Internet security threats … Extract 4.24 ST … [[中国]] 形成 了 较为 完备 的 封建 法典, 并 为 以后 历代 封建王朝 所 传 承 和 发展… TT … China had a fairly complete code of feudal laws, which was passed on and developed in the following feudal dynasties … Extract 4.25 ST … [[中国]] 城镇化 水平 比较 低,2007年 城镇化 比例 只有 44.9%,低于 世界 平均 水平…

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TT … China has a comparatively low level of urbanization, with an urbanization rate of 44.9 percent in 2007, lower than the world’s average … As can be seen, “成功” [successfully] in Extract 4.22 and “严重” [serious] in Extract 4.23 are up-scaling force epithets. Though “成功” is followed by a positive collocate while “严重” collocates with a negative lexical item, both of them function in their contexts to upgrade the degree of intensification of their collocates. In Extract 4.22, the shift-translation of “成功” into “success”, a noun form of “successful”, indicates that the implementation of China’s population policy is a success, which also achieves a functional equivalent effect in the TT. By describing the security threats that China faces as severe, the damaging effect of these security threats is intensified in the ST. The translator provides “严重” with a lexical item “severe”, which conveys an equivalent meaning and helps create a similar degree of disastrous effect of the security threats that China faces in the TT. Extracts 4.24 and 4.25 illustrate the application of the equivalent translation strategy to the down-scaling force epithets. Both “较为” and “比较” have the downgrading effect in the STs though they co-occur with lexical items with different polarities, one positive and the other negative. Both of them are rendered into equivalent lexical items in the TTs, achieving the same effect that the intensification of the appreciation resources which follow them is mitigated. Extract 4.26 ST … 2003年, 阿尔及利亚 发生 6. 8 级 地震, [[中国]] 迅速 向 其 提供 紧急 救 援 物资 并 派遣 国际 救援 队, 救灾 援助 总计 536万 美元… TT … In 2003, when Algeria was hit by a 6.8-magnitude earthquake, China immediately sent emergency relief supplies worth a total of US$5.36 million, and dispatched a rescue team to the disaster-hit area … Extract 4.27 ST … [[中国]] 地方 政府 网站 普遍 设立 了 市长 信箱, 县长 信箱 等, 接受 民众 的 来信… TT … Many local government websites in China have a municipal mayor’s mailbox or county head’s mailbox to receive letters from the public … Extracts 4.26 and 4.27 are retrieved to illustrate the up-shifting and down-shifting translation strategies since there are only positive force epithets that are translated with these two kinds of translation strategies. In Extract 4.26, “迅速” [quickly] upscales the process of China’s act of providing help to Algeria in the ST. It is translated into “immediately” rather than “quickly”. By doing so, the process of China’s act is presented in a more upgraded manner in the TT since “immediately” means “happening or done at once and without delay”. Thus, it is regarded that “迅速” is dealt

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with by the translator with the up-shifting translation strategy. By contrast, “普遍” [generally] is translated into “many”, not “most” in the TT, which in a sense downgrades the intensification of the positive description of China’s act, specifically the behaviour of the local governments of China, to establish an interactive web platform between governments and the public, which is regarded as a positive initiation. Extract 4.28 ST … [[中国]] 将 始终 秉承 自强不息, 开拓进取, 开放 包容, 同舟共济 的 “亚洲 精神 ”, 永 做 亚洲 其他 国家 的 好 邻居, 好 朋友 伙伴 … TT … China will uphold the Asian spirit of standing on its own feet, being bold in opening new ground, being open and inclusive and sharing weal and woe. It will remain a good neighbor, friend and partner of other Asian countries … Extract 4.29 ST … [[中国]] 受 季风气候 影响 十分 强烈, 气象 灾害 频繁, 局地 性 或 区域性 干旱 灾害 几乎 每年 都 会 出现 … TT … Its monsoon climate has a strong impact on China, and causes frequent meteorological disasters … Extract 4.30 ST … [[中国]] 建立 了 较 完备 的 履约 法律 体系, 设立 了 国家 履约 联络点, 按时 向 公约 履约 支持 机构 提交 公约 建立 信任 … TT … China has already established a comprehensive legislation system for the implementation of the Convention, set up a national implementation focal point, and submitted its declarations regarding confidence-building measures to the Implementation Support Unit of the Convention in a timely fashion … Extract 4.31 ST … [[中国]] 生态 环境 比较 脆弱, 水土 流失 和 荒漠化 严重, 森林 覆盖率 18. 21%, 仅 相当 于 世界 平均 水平 的 62% … TT … China has a fragile eco-environment, with serious soil erosion and desertification and a forest coverage rate of 18.21 percent, only 62 percent of the world’s average … The strategy of zero translation is exemplified in the four Extracts from 4.28 to 4.31. Both “始终” [always] in Extract 4.28 and “十分” [very, dramatically] in 4.29

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are up-scaling force epithets, with the former followed by a positive collocate and the later followed by a negative one. Both of them upgrade the intensification of either the tenacity of China’s upholding the Asian spirit or the quality of monsoon climate’s influence on China. The strategy of not providing corresponding linguistic units makes the appraisal meaning embedded with less power in the TTs. For example, the translation of Extract 4.29 implies that the impact that monsoon climate exerts on China is strong, but not very strong enough to cause dramatically disastrous damages. By contrast, both “较” [fairly, relatively] and “比较” [fairly, relatively] in Extracts 4.30 and 4.31 are down-scaling force epithets. In other words, the inclusions of “ 较” and “比较” in these contexts scale down the force of their co-occurring lexical items. To take “较” in Extract 4.30 for example, the legislation system that China has established is not a system so comprehensive that needs no more formulations of law, but a fairly comprehensive system which yet still implies a room for further formulations of more laws. As can be seen, both of them in these two cases are translated with the zero translation strategy in the TTs. All in all, four more cases of the zero translation strategy are taken into account for the above four force epithets. Compared with the force epithets in the Self-category, the number of the focus epithets is rather smaller, which implies that most Graduation epithets in this study are gradable. But similar to the English translation of the force epithets, the adoption of the equivalent translation strategy also accounts for a larger share in both the subcategories of the sharpening and the softening epithets, representing 83 and 73%, respectively. Another similarity is that there are more positive epithets than negative ones in terms of both the equivalent translation strategy and the zero translation strategy. It might be because there are a smaller number of focus epithets in the Self-category so that no case of up-shifting translation strategy or down-shifting translation strategy has been identified for the focus epithets. The following extracts are retrieved to illustrate each of the translation strategies applied to the focus epithets in the Self-category. Extract 4.32 ST … [[中国]] 人民 有 决心 也 完全 有 能力 早日 解决 台湾 问题, 完成 祖国 统 一 大业 … TT … The Chinese people are determined and absolutely able to bring the Taiwan question to an early settlement and realize the great cause of reunification … Extract 4.33 ST … 目前, [[中国]] 已 初步 形成 了 门类 齐全, 结构 相对 合理, 具有 一定 配 套 性 和 完整性 的 食品 质量 安全 标准 体系 … TT … Now, a food quality and safety standard system covering all categories, featuring a relatively rational structure and being fairly complete, has taken initial shape in China …

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Extract 4.34 ST … 今年, [[我国]] 加入 世贸组织 过渡期 将 基本 结束, 要 增强 做好 各项 应 对 工作 的 紧迫感… TT … Since the transitional period for China’s accession to the WTO will basically end this year, we need to heighten our sense of urgency to be sure we complete all related work … Extracts from 4.32 to 4.34 are presented to show the use of the equivalent translation strategy in dealing with focus epithets. While “完全” [absolutely] in Extract 4.32 is a sharpening focus epithet followed by a positive lexical item, “初步” [initially] and “基本” [basically] are two softening focus epithets, one collocating with a positive linguistic unit while the other with a negative one. These three focus epithets, regardless of them being sharpening or softening and their collocates being positive or negative, are all provided with an equivalent lexical item in their corresponding TTs. To take “初步” in Extract 4.33 for example, it is used to appraise China in a downgrading way by stating that China has initially set up a food quality and safety standard system. The use of “初步” implies that this system has not been completely established yet since the initially established system is not a prototypical system for food quality and safety standard. As the TT shows, it is not translated into “initially” to modify “take shape”, but into “initial” to modify “shape” in the TT, which means that it is translated with a shifting translation strategy. However, such way to deal with “初步” realises the same functional effect that it conveys in the ST. According to the standards of classifying translation strategies discussed at the beginning of this chapter, this is also regarded as the strategy of equivalent translation. It is therefore counted as one time in the frequency of the equivalent translation strategy for the softening focus epithets that co-occur with positive collocate. Extract 4.35 ST … 经过 新 中国 成立 56年 来 的 探索 和 奋斗, [[中国]] 彻底 改变 了 一穷二 白 的 落后 面貌, 生产力 迅猛 发展, 综合国力 显著 增强 … TT … after making a range of explorations and efforts over the past 56 years since the founding of New China, China has cast off its former state of abject poverty … Extract 4.36 ST …许多 地方 贫困 人口 普遍 增加 的 时候, 中国 是 个 例外 . “ [[中国]] 在 解 决 绝对 贫困 问题 上 所 取得 的 成就 举世 公认 “ … TT … And China has achieved world-renowned progress in solving the poverty problem …

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Extract 4.37 ST … 经过 几十 年 的 努力, [[中国]] 已经 初步 形成 了 煤炭 为 主体, 电力 为 中心, 石油 天然气 和 可 再生 能源 全面 发展 的 能源 供应… TT … Thanks to the efforts made over the past few decades, China has built an energy supply framework with coal as the main energy resource and electricity as the focus, featuring an overall development of oil, gas and renewable resources … The focus epithets in Extracts 4.35, 4.36, and 4.37 are all rendered into English with the zero translation strategy. The sharpening focus epithet “彻底” in Extract 4.35 up-scales China’s act to cast off its situation of abject poverty, an act that is described as a positive one. However, the appraisal meaning it conveys in the ST is softened in the TT since it is not translated. “绝对贫困” [abject poverty] in Extract 4.36 is reduced to “poverty” in its TT. In this way, the progress that China archives is profiled in an up-scaling way. In contrast with Extract 4.33 in which “初步” is translated with an equivalent translation strategy, Extract 4.37 demonstrates the application of the zero translation strategy to the softening focus epithet “初步”. Instead of translating the sentence into “China has initially built an energy supply framework…”, the TT in Extract 4.37 indicates that China has already finished building a framework for energy supply. The application of the zero translation strategy to “初步” in Extract 4.37 contributes to the formation of an effect in the TT that China is profiled to a higher level. For the frequency of translation strategy, each of the above three cases is counted once in the group of the zero translation strategy.

4.2.3.2

Translation of the Graduation Epithets in Other-Category

Tables 4.10 and 4.11 illustrate the English translations of the force epithets and the focus epithets in the Other-category on the basis of the different parameters: the types of translation strategies, the polarity of the epithets, and the up-scaling and the down-scaling sub-categories. For the force epithets in the Other-category as is shown in Table 4.10, the frequency of the equivalent translation strategy is still again the largest portion out of the total, which accounts for 85 and 92% in the up-scaling sub-category and the down-scaling sub-category, respectively. On the one hand, this implies that the translators prefer the adoption of the equivalent translation strategy for the force epithets in the Othercategory as they do for the force epithets in the Self-category. On the other hand, it also exposes a difference between the Self-category and the Other-category in terms of the English translation of the force epithets that a larger portion of the downscaling force epithets rather than the up-scaling force epithets in the Other-category are translated with the strategy of equivalent translation. Another two differences are also identified in Table 4.10 between the Self-category and the Other-category. One is that, in terms of the equivalent translation strategy, the proportion of the negative force epithets to the positive force epithets in the

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Other-category is larger than its counterparts in the Self-category. The values of this proportion are 85 and 175% for the up-scaling force epithets and the down-scaling force epithets, respectively in the Other-category. But the values of this proportion for the up-scaling force epithets and the down-scaling force epithets in the Selfcategory account for only 7 and 81%, respectively as is shown in Table 4.8. The other difference is that there are more negative force epithets, both up-scaling and down-scaling ones, in the Other-category that are translated through the strategy of zero translation, compared with the frequency of the zero translation strategy in the Self-category. Table 4.10 also shows that there are three cases of positive force epithets and one case of negative force epithet in the up-scaling sub-category that are rendered into English with the strategy of up-shifting translation and there is one case of negative force epithet in the up-scaling sub-category that is translated with the strategy of down-shifting translation. No case of the down-scaling force epithet is found to be translated with the up-shifting or the down-shifting translation strategy. Extracts from 4.38 to 4.41 are used to demonstrate the translation strategies with which the force epithets in the Other-category are rendered into English. Extract 4.38 ST … [[加拿大]] 以 美国 为 重点 进一步 巩固 同 传统 盟友 关系, 加强 同 拉美 地区 关系, 继续 加大 在 北极, 阿富汗 等 热点 问题 上 的 外交 力度, 积极 拓展 同 新兴 经济体 合作, 大力 推进 贸易 多元化 … TT … It further solidified its relations with traditional allies, in particular the US, strengthened the relations with Latin American countries, and enhanced diplomatic efforts on hotspots such as those concerning the Arctic and Afghanistan. It expanded cooperation with the emerging economies and further diversified its trade structure … Extract 4.39 ST … [[美国]] 在 全球 范围 广泛 从事 秘密 监听… TT … The United States conducts widespread secret surveillance across the globe … Extract 4.40 ST …组阁 僵局 和 安全 形势 等 影响, [[伊拉克]] 经济 重建 进展 缓慢… TT … Progress in Iraq’s economic reconstruction was slow due to the government formation stalemate and security situation …

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Extract 4.41 ST … 在 南沙 群岛 中, [[菲律宾]] 仅仅 挑 出 少数 几 个 岛礁, 要求 仲裁 庭 就 其 海洋 权利 作出 裁定, 实质 上 是 否定 中国 对 南沙 群岛 的 领土 主权 … TT … in respect of the Nansha Islands, the Philippines selects only a few features and requests the Arbitral Tribunal to decide on their maritime entitlements. This is in essence an attempt at denying China’s sovereignty over the Nansha Islands as a whole … Extracts from 4.38 to 4.41 are all translated with the strategy of equivalent translation. Among these epithets, “进一步” [further] in Extract 4.38 and “广泛” [widespread] in Extract 4.39 are up-scaling force epithets while “缓慢” [slow] in Extract 4.40 and “仅仅” [only] in Extract 4.41 are down-scaling force epithets. In terms of the two sub-categories of the up-scaling and the down-scaling force epithets, one of the two epithets in each sub-category is followed by a lexical item with positive polarity while the other one collocates with one lexical item with negative polarity. In Extract 4.38, “进一步” in the ST is positively appraising Canada as this country is trying to promote the relationships with other countries and the development of the world, which can be proved particularly by its efforts to cooperate with newly emerging economics and its efforts to diversify its trade structure. By contrast, “广 泛” in Extract 4.39 is yet negatively appraising the United States because the scope of its secret surveillance, which was under fierce criticism, is up-scaled. The equivalent translations of these two up-scaling epithets realise the same functional effects in the TTs as they do in the STs, in which Canada is positively appraised while the United States is negatively appraised and the intensification of such appraising is upgraded. As can be seen clearly, “缓慢” [slow] in Extract 4.40 and “仅仅” [only] in Extract 4.41 are down-scaling force epithets and function to tone down the intensification or the quantification of their collocates in the contexts. While “缓慢” collocates with a positive word, “仅仅” is followed by a lexical item with negative polarity. In the ST of Extract 4.40, the inclusion of the down-scaling force epithet “缓慢” reduces the speed of the process in Iraq’s economic reconstruction. In the ST of Extract 4.41, “仅 仅” implies the reduction of the quantification of the Philippines’ selection of islands for the Arbitral Tribunal, profiling the Philippines’ wicked purpose to deny China’s sovereignty over the Nansha Islands as a whole. The application of the equivalent translation strategy to these two down-scaling force epithets thus also achieves the effects in the TTs as they project in their STs. Extract 4.42 ST … 世博会 [[阿联酋]] 国家 馆 反响 良好, 参观 游客 数量 突破 180万 … TT … The national pavilion of the UAE at the Shanghai World Expo was quite popular and received over 1.8 million visitors …

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Extract 4.43 ST … 在 曾经 发生 两 场 激烈 战斗 的 [[伊拉克]] 城市 费卢杰, 婴儿 出生 缺陷 率 由 战前 的 10% 猛增 到 2007 - 2010年 的 50% 以上 … TT …the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which saw two of the heaviest battles during the Iraq war, more than half of all babies surveyed were born with a birth defect between 2007 … Extract 4.44 ST … 在 美国 总统 竞选 中, 易 出 问题 的 投票 器, 对 投票 器 做手脚 的 风险, 计票 缺乏 透明 以及 选举 人 团 制度 都 使 [[美国]] 的 选举 制度 存在 严重 缺 陷… TT America’s trouble-prone voting machines, the risk of tampering in those machines, the lack of transparency in vote tabulation, and then the Electoral College system, combine to give the country an election system that leaves much to be desired … All the force epithets to be analysed in Extracts from 4.42 to 4.44 are up-scaling force epithets. “良好” [good] in Extract 4.42 and “激烈” [fierce] in Extract 4.43 are translated with the up-shifting translation strategy while “严重” [serious] in Extract 4.44 is considered as a case translated with the down-shifting translation strategy. In Extract 4.42, “良好” is used to positively appraise UAE, an Other-item, as its national pavilion was popular among the visitors. However, it was rendered into “quite popular” in the TT. According to Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, “quite” means “very”, though “not extremely”. It is thus translated with the up-shifting translation strategy, which intensifies the popularity of the UAE’s national pavilion. Similar to “良好”, the translation of “激烈” in Extract 4.43 is also regarded as the use of the up-shifting translation strategy, since it is rendered into “heaviest”, a superlative form, rather than “heavy” or “intense”, to modify “battles” in the TT. That is to say, the intensification of the battle that Iraq experienced is ungraded in the TT compared with what its counterpart indicates in the ST. Extract 4.44 illustrates a special case of shifting translation. Here, “严重缺陷” [serious defect] is euphemistically rendered into “much to be desired”, which, in a sense, down-scales the intensification of the seriousness of the defect in the election system of the United States. All these three cases are considered as the application of the shifting translation strategy and are counted once for each of them in respective categories. Extract 4.45 ST … 1997年 以来, 随着 中国 商品 进入 美国 市场, [[美国]] 消费者 每年 至少 节约 数百亿 美元 的 支出…

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TT … Since 1997, US consumers have saved billions of dollars every year by buying Chinese commodities—US$600 billion in the past decade and nearly US$100 … Extract 4.46 ST … 2008年, [[美国]] 经济 金融 形势 不断 恶化, 第一二三四 季度 国内 生产 总值 增速 分别 为 化 0. 9%2. 8%-0. 5%-6. 3% … TT … The economic and financial situations in the United States worsened in 2008. Its GDP grew by 1.1% for the whole year and 0.9%, 2.8%, −0.5% and −6.3% respectively in the four quarters … Extract 4.47 ST … 2010年 [[美国]] 强奸 案 被捕 率 仅 为 24% … TT … In 2010, the arrest rate for rape was 24 percent in the U.S. … Extracts from 4.45 to 4.47 are cases of zero translation in which “至少” [at least] and “不断” [consistently] are identified as up-scaling force epithets while “ 仅” [only] is a down-scaling force epithet. In Extract 4.45, “至少” upgrades the amount of money that the consumers of the United States saved each year. However, the TT provides no corresponding linguistic unit for “至少” and thus it is counted as one time in the frequency of the strategy of zero translation in the up-scaling category of the positive force epithet, which causes an effect that the amount of money that the consumers of the United States saved each year tends to be less than expected as it is in the ST. Followed by a negative lexical item, “不断” in Extract 4.46 up-scales the negativity of the United States by describing its economic and financial situations deteriorate in a consistent manner. As is shown above, the strategy of zero translation is applied by the translator to this up-scaling force epithet. This means that the ST presents a meaning that the economic and financial situations in the United States kept worsening instead of the meaning expressed in the TT that its economic and financial situations became worse. As a down-scaling force epithet, “仅” [only] in Extract 4.47 negatively appraises the United Stated as its arrest rate for rape is as low as 24%. The inclusion of “仅” in the ST achieves an effect that the quantification of the arrest rate in the United States is dragged back to the direction of the low polarity. This effect, however, is not reproduced in the English translation because “仅” finds no equivalent in the TT. Thus, each of these three epithets is counted once in terms of the zero translation strategy accordingly. Table 4.11 shows the English translation of the focus epithets in the Othercategory. As it shows, there is no case of the strategy of up-shifting translation or down-shifting translation, which in a sense reflects there are only a small number of the focus epithets in the Other-category. As for the equivalent translation strategy,

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while there is one case of the negative softening focus epithet, there are eight cases of the positive sharpening focus epithets, which accounts for 89% of the total number of the application of the equivalent translation strategy and 73% of the total sharpening focus epithets in the Other-category. This implies that most of the sharpening focus epithets are translated with the strategy of equivalent translation, and particularly the positive sharpening focus epithets. In the sub-category of softening focus epithet, Table 4.11 also shows that the use of the equivalent translation strategy occupies the largest portion. Compared with the sharpening focus epithets, there are more negative focus epithets that are rendered through the equivalent translation strategy, which accounts for 70%. As for the strategy of zero translation, there are only two negative focus epithets in the sharpening sub-category without any positive sharpening focus epithets being translated through the zero translation strategy. And there are two cases of the softening focus epithet in each of the sub-categories of the positive focus epithets and of the negative focus epithets. Extracts are also retrieved to demonstrate the English translation of the focus epithets in the Other-category. Among them, Extracts from 4.48 to 4.51 are cases of equivalent translation and Extracts from 4.52 to 4.54 illustrate the application of the zero translation strategy. Extract 4.48 ST … [[美国]] 公民 并 没有 真正 享有 平等 的 选举权 … TT … American citizens have never really enjoyed common and equal suffrage … Extract 4.49 ST … 六 国 与 [[伊朗]] 也 未 完全 关闭 对话 与 谈判 的 大门 … TT … The P5 + 1 had not completely shut its door to dialogue and negotiation with Iran … Extract 4.50 ST … [[澳大利亚]] 新 一届 工党 政府 基本 延续 前 政府 外交 政策, 强化 与 美 国, 日本 关系 … TT … The new Labor government of Australia inherited most of its predecessor’s foreign policy, strengthening ties with the US and Japan … Extract 4.51 ST … 2011年, 近 3200 起 在 [[美国]] 军队 中 的 强奸 和 性 侵害 事件 被 正式 报道, 就 连 五角大楼 也 承认 这些 事件 仅 占 所有 此类 事件 的 15% …

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TT … In 2011, nearly 3200 rapes and sexual assaults were officially reported, but the Pentagon admits that represents just 15 percent of all incidents … “真正” [really] in Extract 4.48 and “完全” [completely] in Extract 4.49 are sharpening focus epithets, while “基本” [in the main] in Extract 4.50 and 近” [nearly] in Extract 4.51 are softening focus epithets. Among these four focus epithets, “真正” and “基本” are followed by positive lexical items while “完全” and “近” collocate with negative linguistic units. As mentioned above, all of them are rendered into their corresponding linguistic units in the TTs. Of note is that “真正” and “完全” also collocate with disclaim epithets “没有” [never] and “未” [not] in the Engagement system in their contexts. Yet the polarity of negativity of these two collocates is not considered here because the translations of the disclaim epithets are counted when discussing the Appraisal System as a whole, which means that the additive effect is to be displayed in the statistical analysis. In Extract 4.48, “真正” is used to upgrade the equality of the election rights that the American citizens enjoyed though it is denied through the disclaim epithet “没 有”. Similar to “真正” in Extract 4.48, “完全” in Extract 4.49 also sharpens the impossibility of more dialogue and negotiation with Iran though such sharpening of door closing is retained with a disclaim resource. So the application of the equivalent translation strategy to these two sharpening focus resources archives the same effect in the TT as the effect they create in the STs. In Extract 4.50, “基本” is considered as a case of a shifting translation strategy because “inherited most of its predecessor’s foreign policy” means the same as “continues its predecessor’s foreign policy by and large”, which indicates that the ST and the TT produce the same functional effect. So it is counted as one case of the equivalent translation strategy. “近” in Extract 4.51 plays a downgrading role in presenting the number of rape and sexual assault cases that happened in the army of the United States. “Nearly 3,200” does not mean “as many as 3,200”. The translators’ decisions to adopt an equivalent translation strategy during the translation process thus leave these two softening focus epithets achieving the same effect as they do in the STs. As a result, one time use of the equivalent translation strategy is calculated for each of them. Extract 4.52 ST … 据 德国 “ 明镜 “ 周刊 网站 、 “ 纽约 时报 “ 网站 报道, [[美国]] 国家 安 全局 尤其 花 大 力气 监控 全球 第二 大 通信 设备 供应商 华为 公司… TT … The websites of Der Spiegel and the New York Times have also reported how the NSA has made huge efforts to spy on Huawei Technologies, the second largest telecom solutions provider in the world …

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Extract 4.53 ST … 中国 美国 商会 2005年 调查 显示, 约 70% 的 [[美国]] 公司 在 华 赢利, 约 42% 的 公司 在 华 利润率 超过 其 全球 的 平均 利润率… TT … A 2005 survey by the American Chamber of Commerce-People’s Republic of China shows that 70 percent of American firms are making profits in China, and about 42 percent report a higher profit rate than their global average … Extract 4.54 ST … 一 项 军事 调查 显示, 约 1 /5 [[美国]] 军队 中 的 女性 曾经 受到 过 性 侵 害, 但 大多数 受害人 没有 向 有关 机构 报告… TT … A military survey revealed that one in five women in the US forces has been sexually assaulted, but most do not report it… “尤其” in Extract 4.52 is a sharpening focus epithet while “约” [about] in Extract 4.53 and Extract 4.54 is a softening focus epithet. Among them, “尤其” collocates with a negative linguistic unit and “约” is followed with a positive lexical item in Extract 4.53 and with a negative lexical item in Extract 4.54. In the extracts shown above, all of them are rendered with the zero translation strategy. It means that the appraisal meanings they convey in the STs are not rendered into the TTs. In 4.52, “尤 其” sharpens the intensification of efforts and the negativity of the judgement resource of impropriety “监控” [spy] that negatively appraises NSA, a department of the US government. However, “尤其” is not translated, which leads to the result in the TT that the efforts that NSA specially spent in spying on Huawei are not particularly invested. “约” [about] in Extract 4.53, for instance, is expressing in a vague way the number of American companies that are making profits in China. The zero translation of “约” in the TT clearly projects the exact number of the percentage. “70%” is an exact number while “about 70%” is a vague figure, which implies a probability of less than 70% and the writer/speaker’s uncertainty about the percentage. The effect of this zero translation strategy in the TT is that the United States is up-scaled in a positive manner because it is certain that there are clearly 70%, not about 70%, of its companies making profits. All in all, each of them is added one case of the zero translation strategy.

4.3 Summary In sum, this chapter reports the distribution and the frequency of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse and the different translation strategies applied to the appraisal epithets in different sub-categories of the semantic framework of Appraisal System and in both the Self- and the Other-categories. All these translation data are

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the basis for the further statistical analyses of both the English translation patterns of the appraisal epithets, which is at the lexico-grammatical level, and of the variations of stance towards China and other countries, particularly stance variations during the translation process, which is at the discourse semantic level.

References Martin, James Robert, and Peter White. 2005. The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stubbs, Michael. 1996. Text and corpus analysis: Computer-assisted studies of language and culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Wei, Nai Xing [卫乃兴]. 2002. “A corpus-driven study of semantic prosodies in specialized texts [语 料库数据驱动的专业文本语义韵研究].” Modern Foreign Languages [现代外语] (02): 166– 175.

Chapter 5

Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

This chapter deals with the multi-layered comparisons with a series of statistical analyses to identify the translation patterns in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. Statistical analysis is also carried out to examine the variations of stance towards China and other countries through the translators’ mediation of the STs and the TTs. Theoretical accounts for the research results and further discussions in line with the research questions are also provided.

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political Discourse Chi-square Test for Independence is employed to test the association between the country categories, i.e., the Self-category and the Other-category, and the translation strategies, i.e., the equivalent translation strategy, the up-shifting translation strategy, the down-shifting translation strategy, and the zero translation strategy. This type of significance test is adopted in this study to determine the probability of a significant association between the two variables because the purpose of this test is to ascertain whether there exists an association between two categorical variables (Corder and Foreman 2014: 185). A null hypothesis in this study is proposed that there is no correlation between the country categories and the translation strategies applied to the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. Chi-square test for independence expects that less than 25% of the values in the test are below five. Therefore, if the values in each comparison in this study do not meet the statistical requirement, adjacent categories are combined to achieve the minimum expected value. Such case in this study is to aggregate the values of all the up-shifting translation, down-shifting translation, and zero translation strategies into the nonequivalent translation strategies as a contrastive category of the equivalent translation strategy since the main concern is the contrastive study between the Self-category and the Other-category. That is to say, the comparison models in this situation are adjusted © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Li and K. Hu, Reappraising Self and Others, Corpora and Intercultural Studies 6, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9488-5_5

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5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

to the comparisons between the Self-category and the Other-category with respect to the equivalent translation strategy or the non-equivalent translation strategies. However, if the values still cannot meet the statistical requirement, Fisher’s exact test is recommended to be adopted with two-sided tests carried out by Irwin’s rule (Campbell 2007), which is accurate for all sample sizes and only available for 2 × 2 contingency tables. As a practice in statistics, if the values meet the statistical requirement of Chi-square test for independence, Pearson’s χ2 values are used, and if the values don’t meet that requirement, Fisher’s exact test values are adopted. This rule is consistent in all the statistical analyses in this study.

5.1.1 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets in General The statistical analysis of the English translation of the appraisal epithets starts from the statistical test for a whole view—the English translation of all the appraisal epithets under investigation in this study. All the epithets, no matter what categories they are classified in Appraisal System, are acquired and classified into the Self-category and the Other-category, respectively. Such distribution is displayed in Table 5.1. As can be seen from Table 5.2, the statistical result (χ2 = 16.716, p < .05) rejects the null hypothesis. That is to say, there is a statistical association between country category and translation strategy. Table 5.1 shows that there is a larger portion of the appraisal epithets in the Self-category that are dealt with through the equivalent translation strategy compared with the appraisal epithets in the Other-category. Table 5.1 also illustrates that more translation shifts occurred in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Other-category since the ratio of the frequency of Table 5.1 Translation of all appraisal epithets in Self- and Other-categories Translation Country

Equivalent T

Up-shifting T

Down-shifting T

Zero T

Self

4379

32

21

443

Other

752

5

4

119

Table 5.2 Translation pattern of all appraisal epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value χ2

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

16.716a

3

.001

Likelihood ratio

15.417

3

.001

Linear-by-linear association

16.238

1

.000

No. of valid cases

5755

Pearson

a1

cells (12.5%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 3.82

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political …

123

the zero translation strategy to that of the total is larger than that of their counterpart in the Self-category, reaching 14 and 9%, respectively, though the frequency of the equivalent translation strategy in both the Self- and the Other-categories accounts for the largest part of the total use of the translation strategies. This means that the translators are more faithful to the STs when translating the appraisal epithets in the Self-category and mediate to make more shifts in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Other-category. Then it is interesting to examine to what extent the Self-category is different from the Other-category when all the positive appraisal epithets are translated, and when all the negative appraisal epithets are translated. Since the values do not meet the requirement of Chi-square test, translation strategies concerning both the positive and the negative appraisal epithets are classified into the equivalent translation strategy and the non-equivalent translation strategies, with the up-shifting translation strategy, the down-shifting translation strategy, and the zero translation strategy merged into the non-equivalent translation strategies. The results for the English translation of all the positive appraisal epithets and all the negative appraisal epithets are displayed in Tables 5.3 and 5.4. As Table 5.5 shows, there is no statistical significance (χ2 = .594, p > .05) to support a correlation between country category and translation strategy in terms of the English translation of the positive appraisal epithets. This result indicates that the statistical significance shown in Table 5.2 between the Self-category and the Othercategory with respect to the English translation of all the appraisal epithets might be attributed to the English translation of the negative appraisal epithets. Table 5.6 shows that there is a statistical significance (χ2 = 13.946, p < .05), which means that the null hypothesis is rejected and thus there is a strong statistical association between country category and translation strategy with respect to the English translation of the negative appraisal epithets. As Table 5.4 shows, more negative appraisal epithets in the Other-category are translated through the nonequivalent translation strategies with a ratio of the frequency of the non-equivalent translation strategies to that of the equivalent translation strategy being 27%, much larger than 13%, its counterpart in the Self-category. Table 5.3 Translation of all positive appraisal epithets in Self- and Other-categories

Table 5.4 Translation of all negative appraisal epithets in Self- and Other-categories

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity Country

Pos

Pos

Self

3990

445

Other

429

42

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity Country

Neg

Neg

Self

389

51

Other

323

86

124

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.5 Translation pattern of all positive appraisal epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

.594b

1

.441

Continuity correctiona

.475

1

.490

Likelihood ratio

.611

1

.435

Fisher’s exact test Linear-by-linear association

.594

No. of valid cases

4906

1

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.516

.248

.441

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 46.75

a Computed b0

Table 5.6 Translation pattern of all negative appraisal epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

13.946b

1

.000

Continuity correctiona

13.258

1

.000

Likelihood ratio

14.036

1

.000

Linear-by-linear association

13.930

1

.000

No. of valid cases

849

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.000

.000

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 66.00

a Computed b0

Statistical analysis is also conducted when it comes to the English translation of the appraisal epithets with different polarities within each of the country categories. The English translations of the positive appraisal epithets and the negative appraisal epithets in the Self-category and in the Other-category are presented in Tables 5.7 and 5.8. Table 5.7 Translation of the positive and negative appraisal epithets in Self-category

Translation Polarity

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Pos

3990

445

Neg

389

51

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political … Table 5.8 Translation of the positive and negative appraisal epithets in Other-category

Translation Polarity

125

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Pos

429

42

Neg

323

86

Table 5.9 Translation pattern between the appraisal epithets with different polarities in Selfcategory Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

1.062b

1

.303

Continuity correctiona

.898

1

.343

Likelihood ratio

1.025

1

.311

Linear-by-linear association

1.062

1

.303

No. of valid cases

4875

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.321

.171

only for a 2 × 2 table b 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 44.77 a Computed

Table 5.9 shows that there is no significant correlation (χ2 = 1.062, p > .05) between the polarity of the appraisal epithets and the translation strategy in the Self-category. That is to say, the polarity of the appraisal epithets as a whole in the Self-category does not have an influence on the translators’ choices of the equivalent translation strategy or the non-equivalent translation strategies. By contrast, the Chi-square test for the appraisal epithets with different polarities in the Other-category, which is shown in Table 5.10, displays a significant association between the polarity of the appraisal epithets and the translation strategy (χ2 = 25.827, p < .05). From Table 5.8, which shows a big contrast between the ratio of the frequency of the non-equivalent translation strategies to that of the equivalent translation strategy for the positive appraisal epithets (10%) and that for the negative appraisal epithets (27%), it can be concluded that the negative appraisal epithets in the Other-category are most probably translated with the non-equivalent translation strategies. To sum up, there is an association between country category and translation strategy with a statistical significance, the negative appraisal epithets in particular, in terms of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. This association between country category and translation strategy is embodied by the imbalanced application of translation strategies to the appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories. Specifically, the equivalent translation strategy is more probably applied to the appraisal epithets in the Self-category while

126

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.10 Translation pattern between the appraisal epithets with different polarities in Othercategory Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

25.827b

1

.000

Continuity correctiona

24.861

1

.000

Likelihood ratio

26.057

1

.000

Linear-by-linear association

25.797

1

.000

No. of valid cases

880

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.000

.000

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 59.49

a Computed b0

there is more probability of the application of the non-equivalent translation strategies to the appraisal epithets, most probably the negative appraisal epithets, in the Other-category.

5.1.2 Translation Patterns of Attitude Epithets In this section, statistical analyses are conducted with respect to the English translation of the Attitude epithets in general between the Self-category and the Othercategory, and with respect to the English translation of the Attitude epithets with different polarities within each of the country category. Table 5.11 presents the English translation of all the Attitude epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories with a purpose to test the correlation between country category and translation strategies applied to the Attitude epithets as a whole within the two country categories. As can be seen from Table 5.12, the Chi-square test result does not support a statistical association between country category and translation strategies with respect to the English translation of all the Attitude epithets. For further analysis, the Chi-square test is undertaken to examine whether an association exists between country category and translation strategy in terms of all Table 5.11 Translation of all Attitude epithets in Self- and Other-categories

Translation Country

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Self

1957

177

Other

256

15

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political …

127

Table 5.12 Translation pattern of all Attitude epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

2.492b

1

.114

Continuity correctiona

2.131

1

.144

Likelihood ratio

2.735

1

.098

Linear-by-linear association

2.491

1

.114

No. of valid cases

2405

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.123

.067

only for a 2 × 2 table b 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 21.63 a Computed

Attitude epithets with either positive polarity or negative polarity. This is illustrated in Tables 5.13 and 5.14, respectively. As Table 5.15 shows, there is no statistically significant evidence (χ2 = 2.895, p > .05) to reject the null hypothesis that there is a correlation between country category and translation strategy. The classification of the Self-category and the Other-category does not affect the adoption of the equivalent translation strategy or the non-equivalent translation strategies when they are applied to the positive Attitude epithets. Similarly, there is also no evidence of statistical significance (p > .05) as is shown in Table 5.16, which means the statistical result does not support an association between country category and translation strategy. No matter whether they are positive or negative, the statistical result shows that there is no significant difference between the Self-category and the Other-category with respect to the English translation of the Attitude epithets. Table 5.13 Translation of all positive Attitude epithets in Self- and Other-categories

Table 5.14 Translation of all negative Attitude epithets in Self- and Other-categories

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity Country

Pos

Pos

Self

1834

174

Other

157

8

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity Country

Neg

Neg

Self

123

3

Other

99

7

128

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.15 Translation pattern of all positive Attitude epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

2.895b

1

.089

Continuity correctiona

2.419

1

.120

Likelihood ratio

3.332

1

.068

Linear-by-linear association

2.893

1

.089

No. of valid cases

2173

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.106

.053

only for a 2 × 2 table b 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 13.82 a Computed

Table 5.16 Translation pattern of all negative Attitude epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

2.489b

1

.115

Continuity correctiona

1.570

1

.210

Likelihood ratio

2.519

1

.112

Fisher’s exact test Linear-by-linear association

2.478

No. of valid cases

232

1

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.192

.105

.115

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (25.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 4.57

a Computed b1

For further investigation, other statistical analyses are conducted to test the correlation between the polarity of the Attitude epithets and translation strategy. Tables 5.17 and 5.18 are drawn to illustrate the English translations of the Attitude epithets with different polarities within the Self-category and within the Other-category. It can be seen from Table 5.19 that statistical result (p < .05) indicates a significant difference between the polarity of the Attitude epithets and translation strategy in the Table 5.17 Translation of the positive and negative Attitude epithets in Self-category

Translation Polarity

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Pos

1834

174

Neg

123

3

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political … Table 5.18 Translation of the positive and negative Attitude epithets in Other-category

Translation Polarity

129

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Pos

157

8

Neg

99

7

Table 5.19 Translation pattern between the Attitude epithets with different polarities in Selfcategory Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

6.156b

1

.013

Continuity correctiona

5.357

1

.021

Likelihood ratio

8.242

1

.004

Linear-by-linear association

6.153

1

.013

No. of valid cases

2134

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.011

.005

only for a 2 × 2 table b 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 10.45 a Computed

Self-category. The ratios of the frequency of the non-equivalent translation strategies to that of the equivalent translation strategy for both the positive and the negative Attitude epithets show that there is a sharp difference between them with 9% for the positive Attitude epithets and only 2% for the negative Attitude epithets. However, it can also be found from Table 5.17 that the frequency of the non-equivalent translation strategies only accounts for a slight portion of the total, in contrast to that of the equivalent translation strategy adopted by the translators: 91% for the positive Attitude epithets and 98% for the negative Attitude epithets. Regarding the comparison between the English translations of the positive and the negative Attitude epithets in the Other-category, Table 5.20 displays a statistical test result (χ2 = .380, p > .05), not supporting an association between the polarity of the Attitude epithets and translation strategy. In the Other-category, as the data indicate, the polarity of the Attitude epithets does not have an impact on the translators’ choices between the equivalent translation strategy and the non-equivalent translation strategies. Statistical analyses are also carried out in order to examine the English translation of the Attitude epithets in the sub-categories of the Attitude system: affect, judgement, and appreciation. Since there are only two cases of affect epithets, affect epithets are not read into SPSS for significance tests. But it is still worth of note that these two cases of affect epithets are positive ones in the Self-category and are translated with the equivalent translation strategy.

130

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.20 Translation pattern between Attitude epithets with different polarities in Other-category Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

.380b

1

.537

Continuity correctiona

.119

1

.730

Likelihood ratio

.374

1

.541

Linear-by-linear association

.379

1

.538

No. of valid cases

271

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.591

.360

only for a 2 × 2 table b 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 5.87 a Computed

Table 5.21 Translation of all judgement epithets in Selfand Other-categories

Translation Country

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Self

814

81

Other

102

12

Table 5.21 illustrates the data of the English translation of the judgement epithets between the Self-category and the Other-category. It can be seen from Table 5.21 that most of the judgement epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories are translated with the equivalent translation strategy. Though there are some cases of translation shifts, eighty-one in the Self-category and twelve in the Other-category, they account for a small portion of the total. As can be seen from Table 5.22, no significant association (χ2 = .263, p > .05) has been identified between country category and translation strategy with respect to the English translation of all the judgement epithets. This statistical result implies that the country category is not the decisive factor in the process of decision-making by the translators between the equivalent translation strategy and the non-equivalent translation strategies when dealing with the judgement epithets. Tables 5.23 and 5.24 are presenting the English translations of the positive and the negative judgement epithets between the Self-category and the Other-category. The focus is on the correlation between country category and translation strategy in terms of the polarity of the judgement epithets. As Table 5.25 displays, the Chi-square test result (χ2 = .022, p > .05) does not support a significant association between country category and translation strategy when the positive judgement epithets are translated. This can be further proved by the ratio of the frequency of the non-equivalent translation strategies to that of the equivalent translation strategy—10% for both the Self- and the Other-categories, as is shown in Table 5.23.

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political …

131

Table 5.22 Translation pattern of all judgement epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

.263b

1

.608

Continuity correctiona

.116

1

.733

Likelihood ratio

.254

1

.614

Linear-by-linear association

.263

1

.608

No. of valid cases

1009

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.606

.355

only for a 2 × 2 table b 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 10.51 a Computed

Table 5.23 Translation of the positive judgement epithets in Self- and Other-categories

Table 5.24 Translation of the negative judgement epithets in Self- and Other-categories

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity Country

Pos

Pos

Self

796

81

Other

63

6

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity Country

Neg

Neg

Self

18

0

Other

39

6

Table 5.25 Translation pattern of the positive judgement epithets between Self- and Othercategories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

.022b

1

.881

Continuity correctiona

.000

1

1.000

Likelihood ratio

.023

1

.880

Fisher’s exact test Linear-by-linear association

.022

No. of valid cases

946

1

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

1.000

.547

.881

only for a 2 × 2 table b 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 6.35 a Computed

132

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.26 Translation pattern of the negative judgement epithets between Self- and Othercategories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

2.653b

1

.103

Continuity correctiona

1.331

1

.249

likelihood ratio

4.285

1

.038

Linear-by-linear association

2.611

1

.106

No. of valid cases

63

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.170

.120

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (50.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 1.71

a Computed b2

The Chi-square test in Table 5.26 shows no statistical significance (p > .05), which means that there is no significant correlation identified between country category and translation strategy. Similar to the English translation of the positive judgement epithets, no influence from country category is identified for the English translation of the negative judgement epithets. This suggests that the factor of country category is disregarded when dealing with the negative judgement epithets. This is the same case to the English translation of all the judgement epithets in Chinese political discourse. As for the factor of the polarity in the English translation of the judgement epithets, Tables 5.27 and 5.28 are drawn to illustrate the comparisons between the English translations of the positive and the negative judgement epithets in each of the country categories. Table 5.29 shows that there is no evidence of statistical significance (p > .05) to agree with a claim that there is a correlation between the polarity of the judgement epithets and translation strategy in the Self-category. The statistical data do not prove a difference between the application of the equivalent translation strategy and the Table 5.27 Translation of the positive and negative judgement epithets in Self-category

Table 5.28 Translation of the positive and negative judgement epithets in Other-category

Translation Polarity

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Pos

796

81

Neg

18

0

Translation Polarity

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Pos

63

6

Neg

39

6

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political …

133

Table 5.29 Translation pattern between the judgement epithets with different polarities in Selfcategory Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

1.828b

1

.176

Continuity correctiona

.878

1

.349

Likelihood ratio

3.452

1

.063

Linear-by-linear association

1.826

1

.177

No. of valid cases

895

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.396

.178

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (25.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 1.63

a Computed b1

non-equivalent translation strategies with respect to the polarity of the judgement epithets in the Self-category. The same statistical significance (p > .05) is generated as is shown in Table 5.30, for the comparison between the positive and the negative judgement epithets in the Other-category. This indicates that the correlation does not exist between the polarity of the judgement epithets and translation strategy in the Other-category. As for the English translation of the appreciation epithets, statistical analyses are also performed to examine to what extent the Self-category is different from the Other-category with respect to the comparisons of the English translations of the Table 5.30 Translation pattern between the judgement epithets with different polarities in Othercategory Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

.622b

1

.430

Continuity correctiona

.227

1

.634

Likelihood ratio

.610

1

.435

Linear-by-linear association

.617

1

.432

No. of valid cases

114

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.536

.313

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (25.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 4.74

a Computed b1

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

134

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.31 Translation pattern of all appreciation epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

7.226b

1

.007

Continuity correctiona

6.367

1

.012

Likelihood ratio

9.662

1

.002

Linear-by-linear association

7.221

1

.007

No. of valid cases

1394

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.004

.002

only for a 2 × 2 table b 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 11.15 a Computed

Table 5.32 Translation of all appreciation epithets in Selfand Other-categories

Translation Country

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Self

1141

96

Other

154

3

appreciation epithets with different parameters, such as the polarity of the appraisal epithets. Interestingly, different from the English translations of the judgement epithets between the Self-category and the Other-category, the statistical data in Table 5.31 show a significant evidence (p < .05), which indicates a strong association between country category and translation strategy. As is shown in Table 5.32, the appreciation epithets in the Self-category are more probably translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies while the appreciation epithets in the Other-category are more probably rendered into the TTs through the equivalent translation strategy. This is supported by the ratio of the frequency of the non-equivalent translation strategies to that of the equivalent translation strategy: 8% for the Self-category but merely 2% for the Other-category. As Table 5.33 shows, there is an association between country category and translation strategy in terms of the English translation of the positive appreciation epithets with a statistical evidence of significance (p < .05). Similar to the English translation of all the appreciation epithets, it is also identified that the appreciation epithets in the Self-category are more probably translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies in contrast to the appreciation epithets in the Other-category. However, it does not mean that more appreciation epithets in the Self-category are translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies. As can be seen from Table 5.34, the absolute frequencies of the equivalent translation strategy for the appreciation epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories are larger than those of the non-equivalent translation strategies. It should be stressed that there are more

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political …

135

Table 5.33 Translation pattern of the positive appreciation epithets between Self- and Othercategories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

4.684b

1

.030

Continuity correctiona

3.863

1

.049

Likelihood ratio

6.321

1

.012

Linear-by-linear association

4.680

1

.031

No. of valid cases

1225

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.027

.015

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 7.44

a Computed b0

Table 5.34 Translation of the positive appreciation epithets in Self- and Other-categories

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity Country

Pos

Pos

Self

1036

93

Other

94

2

chances for the appreciation epithets in the Self-category to be translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies. Table 5.35 displays a similar trend but Table 5.36 presents no statistical significance (p > .05). Such result indicates that there is no correlation between country category and translation strategy in terms of the English translation of the negative appreciation epithets. To investigate the factor of the polarity in the English translation of the appreciation epithets, Tables 5.37 and 5.38 are drawn to illustrate the comparisons of the English translations of the positive and the negative appreciation epithets in each of the country categories, respectively. Statistical result in Table 5.39 indicates an association of statistical significance (p < .05) between the polarity of the appreciation epithets and translation strategy in the Self-category. From Table 5.37, it can be calculated that the ratio of the frequency of the non-equivalent translation strategies to that of the equivalent translation strategy Table 5.35 Translation of the negative appreciation epithets in Self- and Other-categories

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity Country

Neg

Neg

Self

105

3

Other

60

1

136

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.36 Translation pattern of the negative appreciation epithets between Self- and Othercategories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

.219b

1

.640

Continuity correctiona

.000

1

1.000

Likelihood ratio

.231

1

.631

Linear-by-linear association

.217

1

.641

No. of valid cases

169

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

1.000

.543

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (50.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 1.44

a Computed b2

Table 5.37 Translation of the positive and negative appreciation epithets in Self-category Table 5.38 Translation of the positive and negative appreciation epithets in Other-category

Translation Polarity

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Pos

1036

93

Neg

105

3

Translation Polarity

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Pos

94

2

Neg

60

1

Table 5.39 Translation pattern between the appreciation epithets with different polarities in Selfcategory Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

4.104b

1

.043

Continuity correctiona

3.377

1

.066

Likelihood ratio

5.236

1

.022

Fisher’s exact test Linear-by-linear association

4.101

No. of valid cases

1237

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.039

.023

.043

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 8.38

a Computed b0

1

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political …

137

Table 5.40 Translation pattern between the appreciation epithets with different polarities in Othercategory Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

.039b

1

.843

Continuity correctiona

.000

1

1.000

Likelihood ratio

.040

1

.841

Linear-by-linear association

.039

1

.843

No. of valid cases

157

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

1.000

.665

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (50.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 1.17

a Computed b2

for the appreciation epithets with positive polarity is larger than that for the appreciation epithets with negative polarity. This indicates that in the Self-category, the positive appreciation epithets are more probably translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies. It can be seen from Table 5.40 that the significance test result (p > .05) does not offer evidence that there is a correlation between the polarity of the appreciation epithets and translation strategy with respect to the English translation of the appreciation epithets in the Other-category. To sum up, for the English translation of the Attitude epithets, the statistical analyses indicate that there is no association between country category and translation strategy with Attitude in total, regardless of them being positive or negative. However, statistical data support a correlation between the polarity of the Attitude epithets in the Self-category and translation strategy, which indicates that the non-equivalent translation strategies tend to be employed for the positive Attitude epithets in the Self-category. As for the judgement epithets, statistical test results do not justify associations between country category and translation strategies and between the polarity of the judgement epithets and translation strategy. Different from the English translation of the judgement epithets, correlations are supported by statistical data between country category and translation strategy with respect to the English translation of the appreciation epithets, particularly the positive appreciation epithets, and between the polarity of the appreciation epithets in the Self-category and translation strategy. Statistical test results for the English translation of the appreciation epithets also suggest a more probability of the non-equivalent translation strategies for the appreciation epithets in the Self-category, particularly the positive ones. Interestingly, the whole statistical view from the English translation of the Attitude epithets projects that the Attitude epithets in the Self-category, particularly the positive appreciation epithets, are more likely to be translated through the non-equivalent

138

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

translation strategies, rather than the Attitude epithets in the Other-category. This suggests that more shifts have been carried out by the translators when rendering the Attitude epithets in the Self-category.

5.1.3 Translation Patterns of Engagement Epithets This section deals with the statistical analyses of the English translation of the Engagement epithets. Statistical comparisons are performed between the Selfcategory and the Other-category with respect to the English translation of all the Engagement epithets and with respect to the English translation of the Engagement epithets with different types of dialogical openness, i.e., dialogical contraction or dialogical expansion. Comparisons are also conducted within the Self-category or the Other-category in terms of dialogical openness and the polarity of the Engagement epithets. Table 5.41 shows a general view of the English translation of all Engagement epithets, which are classified into the Self-category and the Other-category. The Chisquare test for independence is conducted to identify the association between country category and translation strategy. As is shown in Table 5.42, the statistical test results (χ2 = 25.291, p < .05) reveal a correlation between country category and translation strategy. Based on the data in Table 5.41, it can be inferred that the Engagement epithets in the Other-category Table 5.41 Translation of all Engagement epithets in Selfand Other-categories

Translation Country

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Self

454

57

Other

120

45

Table 5.42 Translation pattern of all Engagement epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

25.291b

1

.000

Continuity correctiona

24.049

1

.000

Likelihood ratio

22.786

1

.000

Linear-by-linear association

25.254

1

.000

No. of valid cases

676

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.000

.000

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 24.90

a Computed b0

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political …

139

are more probably shifted, i.e., translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies with a portion of 27% in all the Engagement epithets in the Other-category in contrast of an 11% in the Self-category. This also indicates that the Engagement epithets in the Self-category, compared with their counterparts in the Other-category, are more probably dealt with through the equivalent translation strategy. In order to carry out a more detailed analysis on the translation differences between the Self-category and the Other-category, more statistical tests are conducted to compare the Self-category and the Other-category with respect to the English translation of the Engagement epithets projecting either dialogical contraction or dialogical expansion. The English translations of the contractive epithets in both the Self-category and the Other-category are presented in Tables 5.43 and 5.44 shows that there is a statistically significant difference (χ2 = 7.121, p < .05) between the Self-category and the Other-category in terms of the English translation of the contractive epithets, indicating that there is a significant correlation between country category and translation strategy. From Table 5.43, it can be inferred that the English translation of the contractive epithets makes a contribution to the difference between the Self-category and the Other-category with respect to the English translation of all Engagement epithets. That is to say, the translation data of the contractive epithets also show a trend that the contractive epithets in the Other-category are more probably translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies with a portion of 30%. Table 5.43 Translation of all contractive epithets in Selfand Other-categories

Translation

Equivalent T Non-equivalent T

Dialogical openness Country Contraction

Contraction

Self

235

54

Other

100

43

Table 5.44 Translation pattern of all contractive epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

7.121b

1

.008

Continuity correctiona

6.482

1

.011

Likelihood ratio

6.903

1

.009

Linear-by-linear association

7.105

1

.008

No. of valid cases

432

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.010

.006

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 32.11

a Computed b0

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

140

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.45 Translation of the positive contractive epithets in Self- and Other-categories

Table 5.46 Translation of the negative contractive epithets in Self- and Other-categories

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Dialogical openness

Contraction

Contraction

Polarity Country

Pos

Pos

Self

129

34

Other

54

7

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Dialogical openness

Contraction

Contraction

Polarity Country

Neg

Neg

Self

106

20

Other

46

36

Further statistical analyses are also conducted to investigate the translation differences of the contractive epithets between the Self-category and the Other-category with respect to the polarity of the contractive epithets. Tables 5.45 and 5.46 present the English translations of the positive contractive epithets and the negative contractive ones. As Table 5.47 presents, the statistical test result (χ2 = 2.614, p > .05) does not support a correlation between country category and translation strategy. This means that statistical data indicate no difference between the Self-category and the Othercategory when applying the translation strategies to the positive epithets. Given the statistical test result of the English translation of all contractive epithets, there is a probability that a significant difference exists between the Self-category and the Other-category in terms of the English translation of the negative contractive Table 5.47 Translation pattern of the positive contractive epithets between Self- and Othercategories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

2.614b

1

.106

Continuity correctiona

2.024

1

.155

Likelihood ratio

2.821

1

.093

Fisher’s exact test Linear-by-linear association

2.602

No. of valid cases

224

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.123

.074

.107

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 11.17

a Computed b0

1

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political …

141

epithets, as is shown in Table 5.48. The statistical test result (χ2 = 19.836, p < .05) in combination with the translation data in Table 5.46 prove that there is an association between country category and translation strategy, and that the negative contractive epithets in the Other-category are more likely translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies with a ratio of the frequency of the non-equivalent translation strategies to that of the equivalent translation strategy being as high as 78%. As for the contrastive study of the English translations of the expansive epithets between the Self-category and the Other-category, statistical analysis is firstly performed for all the Engagement epithets as a whole which project a dialogical expansion. Table 5.49 shows the translation of all expansive epithets in both Self-category and Other-category. A statistical result (p > .05) shown in Table 5.50 reveals no or not enough evidence for a correlation between country category and translation strategy with respect to the English translation of all the expansive Engagement epithets. Since the frequency of the non-equivalent translation strategies is very rare for both the Self- and the Other-categories, it is pointless for further statistical analyses of the English translation of the positive or the negative expansive epithets in order to test the significant differences between the Self-category and the Other-category with respect to the application of translation strategies. To identify whether differences exist between the English translations of the contractive and the expansive epithets, statistical analyses are conducted with the polarity of the epithets being taken into account. Tables 5.51 and 5.52 illustrate Table 5.48 Translation pattern of the negative contractive epithets between Self- and Othercategories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

19.836b

1

.000

Continuity correctiona

18.436

1

.000

Likelihood ratio

19.599

1

.000

Linear-by-linear association

19.740

1

.000

No. of valid cases

208

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.000

.000

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 22.08

a Computed b0

Table 5.49 Translation of all expansive epithets in Selfand Other-categories

Translation Country

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Self

219

3

Other

20

2

142

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.50 Translation pattern of all expansive epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

5.974b

1

.015

Continuity correctiona

2.740

1

.098

Likelihood ratio

3.586

1

.058

Linear-by-linear association

5.949

1

.015

No. of valid cases

244

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.066

.066

only for a 2 × 2 table b 2 cells (50.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is .45 a Computed

Table 5.51 Translation of the positive contractive and expansive epithets in Self-category

Table 5.52 Translation of the negative contractive and expansive epithets in Self-category

Translation

Equivalent T Non-equivalent T

Polarity Dialogical openness Pos

Pos

Contraction

129

34

Expansion

211

3

Translation

Equivalent T Non-equivalent T

Polarity Dialogical openness Neg

Neg

Contraction

106

20

Expansion

8

0

the English translations of the positive and the negative Engagement epithets in the Self-category. The statistical test in Table 5.53 shows that there is a significant correlation (p < .05) between dialogical openness and translation strategy, which suggests that there is a difference between the contractive and the expensive epithets in terms of the translation strategies applied to them. From the data in Table 5.51, the contractive epithets with positive polarity, in contrast to their expansive counterparts, are more likely translated with the non-equivalent translation strategies. This can be further supported by the ratio of the frequency of the non-equivalent translation strategies to that of the equivalent translation strategy with 26% for the contractive epithets and 1% for the expansive ones in the Self-category. The statistical result (p > .05) in Table 5.54 provides no or insufficient evidence to determine a correlation between dialogical openness and translation strategy. Specifically, no difference is statistically supported between the negative contractive and the negative expansive epithets in terms of the translation strategies that are adopted by the translators.

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political …

143

Table 5.53 Translation pattern between the positive contractive and expansive epithets in Selfcategory Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

39.574b

1

.000

Continuity correctiona

37.407

1

.000

Likelihood ratio

43.522

1

.000

Linear-by-linear association

39.469

1

.000

No. of valid cases

377

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.000

.000

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 16.00

a Computed b0

Table 5.54 Translation pattern between the negative contractive and expansive epithets in Selfcategory Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

1.493b

1

.222

Continuity correctiona

.504

1

.478

Likelihood ratio

2.674

1

.102

Fisher’s exact test Linear-by-linear association

1.481

No. of valid cases

134

1

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.605

.264

.224

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (25.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 1.19

a Computed b1

The English translations of the positive and the negative Engagement epithets in the Other-category are presented in Tables 5.55 and 5.56. Statistical analyses are Table 5.55 Translation of the positive contractive and expansive epithets in Other-category

Translation

Equivalent T Non-equivalent T

Polarity Dialogical openness Pos

Pos

Contraction

54

7

Expansion

18

0

144

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.56 Translation of the negative contractive and expansive epithets in Other-category

Translation

Equivalent T Non-equivalent T

Polarity Dialogical openness Neg

Neg

Contraction

46

36

Expansion

2

2

Table 5.57 Translation pattern between the positive contractive and expansive epithets in Othercategory Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

2.266b

1

.132

Continuity correctiona

1.068

1

.301

Likelihood ratio

3.817

1

.051

Linear-by-linear association

2.238

1

.135

No. of valid cases

79

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.341

.151

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (25.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 1.59

a Computed b1

also conducted to identify the differences between the contractive and the expansive epithets with respect to translation strategy. The statistical test result (p > .5) in Table 5.57 offers no or inadequate evidence to determine an association of statistical significance between dialogical openness and translation strategy. This means that a statistically significant difference between the contractive and the expansive epithets in the Other-category is not supported in terms of the application of the translation strategies to them. When it comes to the English translations of the negative contractive epithets and the negative expansive ones in the Other-category, Table 5.58 presents a similar result (p > .5) that does not confirm a correlation between dialogical openness and translation strategy. The statistical results shown in Tables 5.57 and 5.58 suggest that there is no statistical difference between all the contractive and the expansive epithets in the Other-category in terms of translation strategy. In this section, two features are identified for the English translation of the Engagement epithets through statistical analyses. Firstly, compared with the Self-category, there is a higher probability that the translators apply the non-equivalent translation strategies to the Engagement epithets in the Other-category. This is different from the English translation of the Attitude epithets, discussed earlier in Sect. 5.1.2. This is largely the result of the English translation of the negative contractive epithets in the Other-category. Secondly, there is a statistical difference between the contractive

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political …

145

Table 5.58 Translation pattern between the negative contractive and expansive epithets in Othercategory Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

.057b

1

.810

Continuity correctiona

.000

1

1.000

Likelihood ratio

.057

1

.811

Linear-by-linear association

.057

1

.812

No. of valid cases

86

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

1.000

.599

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (50.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 1.77

a Computed b2

and the expansive epithets in the Self-category in terms of translation strategy, particularly the positive ones while there is no or insufficient evidence of such difference in the Other-category.

5.1.4 Translation Patterns of Graduation Epithets This section is concerned with the statistical analyses of the English translation of the Graduation epithets in Chinese political discourse. Similar to the Engagement epithets, statistical comparisons are also conducted between the Self-category and the Other-category with respect to the translation strategies applied to the Graduation epithets in these two country categories, and between the different types of the Graduation epithets within the Self-category and within the Other-category. Statistical comparisons are conducted using three parameters, i.e., the country categories, the polarity of up-scale and down-scale, and the polarity of positivity and negativity. It is important to note that the translation data of force and focus are aggregated in terms of the up- or the down-scaling polarity within the Self-category and the Other-category. In other words, the translation data of the sharpen focus epithets are merged into the translation data of the up-scaling force epithets and the soften focus ones into the down-scaling force epithets accordingly. The English translation of all Graduation epithets in the Self-category and the Other-category is presented in Table 5.59 and the statistical analysis is shown in Table 5.60. As can be seen in Table 5.60, the Chi-square test results (χ2 = 4.354, p < .05) indicate that there is a correlation between country category and translation strategy. In other words, a statistically significant difference is supported between the Selfcategory and the Other-category in terms of whether the Graduation epithets in

146

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.59 Translation of all Graduation epithets in Selfand Other-categories

Translation Country

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Self

1968

262

Other

376

68

Table 5.60 Translation pattern of all Graduation epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

4.354b

1

.037

Continuity correctiona

4.030

1

.045

Likelihood ratio

4.140

1

.042

Linear-by-linear association

4.352

1

.037

No. of valid cases

2674

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.040

.024

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 54.79

a Computed b0

these two categories are translated through the equivalent translation strategy or not. Table 5.59 shows that for both the Self- and the Other-categories, the equivalent translation strategy tends to be used when translating the Graduation epithets. This is the same as the results of the analyses of the translation strategies used when translating the Attitude epithets and the Engagement epithets. It is safe to argue that all appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse in this study, no matter what subsystems they are classified into, are more likely to be translated with the equivalent translation strategy. This is also confirmed by the general features of the English translation of all appraisal epithets in Sect. 5.1.1. However, from the translation data in Table 5.59, where the ratio of the frequency of the non-equivalent translation strategies to that of the equivalent translation strategy is 18% for the Other-category and 13% for the Self-category, it can be argued that the Graduation epithets in the Other-category tend to be translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies. For further statistical analyses between the Self-category and the Other-category, two other parameters are taken into account, i.e., the polarity of up-scale and downscale, and the polarity of positivity and negativity. Tables 5.61 and 5.62 present the English translations of the up-scaling and the down-scaling Graduation epithets with positive polarity. The data in Tables 5.63 and 5.64 indicate no statistically significant differences (p >.05) between the Self-category and the Other-category when it comes to the translation strategies applied to the positive up-scaling Graduation epithets or the positive down-scaling Graduation epithets. There is no or less sufficient evidence to

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political … Table 5.61 Translation of the positive up-scale Graduation epithets in Selfand Other-categories

Table 5.62 Translation of the positive down-scale Graduation epithets in Selfand Other-categories

147

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity Country

Pos Up-scale

Pos Up-scale

Self

1751

208

Other

189

25

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity Country

Pos Down-scale

Pos Down-scale

Self

65

26

Other

11

2

Table 5.63 Translation pattern of the positive up-scale Graduation epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

.228b

1

.633

Continuity correctiona

.131

1

.718

Likelihood ratio

.223

1

.637

Linear-by-linear association

.228

1

.633

No. of valid cases

2173

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.641

.351

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 22.95

a Computed b0

determine a correlation between country category and translation strategy in terms of the English translation of the Graduation epithets with different polarities. The English translations of the up-scaling and the down-scaling Graduation epithets with negative polarity in the Self- and the Other-categories are presented in Tables 5.65 and 5.66. Statistical analyses are conducted to identify a correlation between country category and translation strategy with respect to the English translations of both the up-scaling and the down-scaling Graduation epithets with negative polarity. As Tables 5.67 and 5.68 show, the statistical data suggest no or inadequate evidence to propose significant difference (p > .5) between the Self-category and the Othercategory with respect to the translation strategies applied to the Graduation epithets in these two categories.

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5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.64 Translation pattern of the positive down-scale Graduation epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

1.005b

1

.316

Continuity correctiona

.447

1

.504

Likelihood ratio

1.111

1

.292

Linear-by-Linear association

.996

1

.318

No. of valid cases

104

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.506

.260

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (25.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 3.50

a Computed b1

Table 5.65 Translation of the negative up-scale Graduation epithets in Selfand Other-categories

Table 5.66 Translation of the negative down-scale Graduation epithets in Selfand Other-categories

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity Country

Neg Up-scale

Neg Up-scale

Self

120

19

Other

155

37

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity Country

Neg Down-scaling

Neg Down-scaling

Self

32

9

Other

21

4

Statistical comparisons are also conducted between the up-scaling and the downscaling Graduation epithets within each country category around the parameter of the polarity of positivity and negativity. Tables 5.69 and 5.70 present the English translations of the positive and the negative Graduation epithets in the Self-category to test the correlation of the polarity of up-scale and down-scale with translation strategy. Table 5.71 shows that statistical result offers evidence for significant difference (χ2 = 27.721, p < .05) between the up-scaling and the down-scaling Graduation epithets in the Self-category with respect to the translation strategies applied to them. As can be found from the translation data in Table 5.69, the positive downscaling Graduation epithets are more likely to be translated with the non-equivalent translation strategies compared with their counterparts in the up-scale group, as can

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political …

149

Table 5.67 Translation pattern of the negative up-scale Graduation epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

1.800b

1

.180

Continuity correctiona

1.424

1

.233

Likelihood ratio

1.833

1

.176

Linear-by-linear association

1.795

1

.180

No. of valid cases

331

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.235

.116

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 23.52

a Computed b0

Table 5.68 Translation pattern of the negative down-scale Graduation epithets between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

.348b

1

.555

Continuity correctiona

.073

1

.787

Likelihood ratio

.356

1

.551

Fisher’s exact test Linear-by-linear association

.342

No. of valid cases

66

1

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.752

.400

.558

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (25.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 4.92

a Computed b1

Table 5.69 Translation of the up-scale and down-scale positive Graduation epithets in Self-category

Table 5.70 Translation of the up-scale and down-scale negative Graduation epithets in Self-category

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity

Pos

Pos

Up-scale

1751

208

Down-scale

65

26

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity

Neg

Neg

Up-scale

120

19

Down-scale

32

9

150

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.71 Translation pattern between the up-scale and down-scale positive Graduation epithets in Self-category Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

27.721b

1

.000

Continuity correctiona

25.974

1

.000

Likelihood ratio

20.982

1

.000

Linear-by-linear association

27.707

1

.000

No. of valid cases

2050

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.000

.000

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 10.39

a Computed b0

be seen that the ratio of the frequency of the non-equivalent translation strategies to that of the equivalent translation strategy for the positive down-scale group reaches as high as 40%, much higher than 12% for the positive up-scale group. Different from the English translation of the Graduation epithets with positive polarity in the Self-category, statistical evidence (χ2 = 1.653, p > .05) in Table 5.72 shows that there is no significant difference between the English translations of the up-scaling and the down-scaling Graduation epithets with negativity in terms of the translation strategies applied. Tables 5.73 and 5.74 present the English translations of the positive and the negative Graduation epithets in the Other-category. Statistical analyses are also performed Table 5.72 Translation pattern between the up-scale and down-scale negative Graduation epithets in Self-category Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

1.653b

1

.199

Continuity correctiona

1.083

1

.298

Likelihood ratio

1.549

1

.213

Linear-by-linear association

1.644

1

.200

No. of valid cases

180

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.222

.149

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 6.38

a Computed b0

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

5.1 Translation Patterns of the Appraisal Epithets in Chinese Political … Table 5.73 Translation of the up-scale and down-scale positive Graduation epithets in Other-category

Table 5.74 Translation of the up-scale and down-scale negative Graduation epithets in Other-category

Translation

Equivalent T

151

Non-equivalent T

Polarity

Pos

Pos

Up-scale

189

25

Down-scale

11

2

Translation

Equivalent T

Non-equivalent T

Polarity

Neg

Neg

Up-scale

155

37

Down-scale

21

4

to identify the differences between the English translations of the up-scaling and the down-scaling Graduation epithets in the Other-category in terms of the translation strategies that are applied to them. As Tables 5.75 and 5.76 display, no statistical difference (p > .05) is suggested by the test results between the up-scaling and the down-scaling Graduation epithets in the Other-category in terms of the translation strategies, regardless of them being positive or negative. In other words, there is no or inadequate evidence for a correlation between translation strategy and the polarity of up-scale or down-scale with respect to the English translation of the Graduation epithets in the Other-category. To sum up for the statistical analyses of the English translation of the Graduation epithets, two patterns are identified. Firstly, similar to the Attitude and the Engagement epithets, the Graduation epithets in general or in each sub-category are likely to be rendered into English through the equivalent translation strategy. Secondly, the Table 5.75 Translation pattern between the up-scale and down-scale positive Graduation epithets in Other-category Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

.160b

1

.689

Continuity correctiona

.000

1

1.000

Likelihood ratio

.149

1

.699

Linear-by-linear association

.160

1

.690

No. of valid cases

227

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

.657

.473

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (25.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 1.55

a Computed b1

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

152

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

Table 5.76 Translation pattern between the up-scale and down-scale negative Graduation epithets in Other-category Chi-Square tests Value

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

Pearson χ2

.154b

1

.694

Continuity correctiona

.015

1

.903

Likelihood ratio

.160

1

.689

Linear-by-linear association

.154

1

.695

No. of valid cases

217

Fisher’s exact test

Exact Sig. (2-sided)

Exact Sig. (1-sided)

1.000

.469

only for a 2 × 2 table cells (25.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 4.72

a Computed b1

non-equivalent translation strategies tend to be used when dealing with the Graduation epithets in the Other-category and the positive down-scaling Graduation epithets in the Self-category.

5.2 Variations of Stance Through Translating Appraisal Epithets By making different choices among the meaning reservoir in the process of translation, the translators of Chinese political discourse adopt different linguistic forms to represent different appraisal meanings, consciously or unconsciously projecting different stances. Based on the translation data in the previous section, we deal with here the statistical analysis of the variations of stance due to the English translation of the appraisal epithets within the framework of Appraisal System and in both the Self- and the Other-categories. Again, for the sake of convenient presentation, the analyses are conducted for one sub-system after another and finally for all as a whole. Statistical comparisons are conducted at different levels accordingly. Here a classification is made at the level of the variations of stance. Based on the translation data of the different translation strategies and the appraisal epithets with different polarities, three different types of stance variations are identified and categorised: stance equalled, stance upgraded, and stance downgraded. As those terms imply, stance equalled means that the appraisal meaning in the STs is well kept in the TTs without any shift in meaning and the same stance taken in the STs is achieved in the TTs, which means that the ways in which the Self- and the Otheritems are presented, either positively or negatively, are well kept in the TTs. Stance upgraded means that, compared with the STs, the TTs express more meanings with

5.2 Variations of Stance Through Translating Appraisal Epithets

153

which the Self-items or the Other-items are appraised in the upgrading way, either positively or negatively. Just opposite to stance upgraded, stance downgraded refers to the downgrading of appraisal meanings in the TTs compared with their corresponding STs in a way that the Self-items or the Other-items are appraised in the downgrading way, either positively or negatively. This classification is of importance in that the statistical analyses of the meaning shifts in terms of the Self- and the Other-items can in one way or another reveal the ideological factors hidden in the translation process and hence in the TTs. The criteria used to categorise the translation data are explained in the following sections, based on these three types of stance variations. Of note is that the variations of stance originate from the combined effects of the English translation of all the appraisal epithets allocated in the different categories of Appraisal System. The statistical analyses are based on the whole view of the translation data, which means that the analyses do not specifically go further for the translation data in the sub-categories of the sub-systems within Appraisal System. Statistical analysis is conducted only to examine the whole effect of the stance variations. However, it does not mean that the comparisons and the statistical analyses are not important for the variations of stance through the English translation of the appraisal epithets in each sub-category of Appraisal System, but not a concern of this chapter because this book focuses on the variations of stance towards China and other countries from a holistic perspective.

5.2.1 Variations of Stance Through Translating Attitude Epithets For the appraisal epithets in the Attitude system, the equivalent translation strategy is considered to have achieved stance equalled, no matter whether it is applied to positive or negative epithets, and thus the frequency of the translators’ adoption of the equivalent translation strategy is the frequency of stance equalled. As for the use of the up-shifting translation strategy, if it is applied to the positive epithets, it is considered as stance upgraded in that the appraisal meaning is upgraded in a positive way in the TTs so that the Self-item or the Other-item is more highly profiled in a positive way. Thus, the frequency of the positive epithets with the upshifting translation strategy becomes part of the frequency of stance upgraded. If the up-shifting translation strategy is applied to the negative epithets, it is regarded as stance downgraded because the negative meaning of the appraisal epithets is upscaled in the TTs so that the Self-item or the Other-item is more negatively profiled compared with their profiles in the STs. So the frequency of the negative epithets with the up-shifting translation strategy becomes part of the frequency of stance downgraded. The strategy of down-shifting translation produces an opposite effect. If a positive epithet is translated with the down-shifting translation strategy, it means its positivity

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5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

is reduced in the TT, which leads to a functional effect that the Self-item or the Otheritem it appraises is less highly profiled compared with the way they are presented in the STs. Thus, the down-shifting translation of a positive epithet is regarded as stance downgraded. By contrast, if the down-shifting translation strategy is applied to a negative epithet, it means that the degree of negativity of the Self-item or the Other-item is down-scaled, which indicates in a sense that the Self-item or the Otheritem is upgraded in a positive way. The down-shifting translation of a negative epithet is thus regarded as stance upgraded. The frequency of the down-shifting translation strategy is also allocated to the frequencies of the different types of stance variations on the basis of the polarity of the appraisal epithets to which it is applied. Similar to the strategy of down-shifting translation, the zero translation of a positive epithet is considered as stance downgraded in that the effect the Attitude epithet produces by positively appraising the Self-item or the Other-item is removed and the profile of the Self-item or the Other-item is thus in a way downgraded. If the zero translation strategy is applied to a negative epithet, the TT creates an effect that the Self-item or the Other-item is in a sense positively profiled in that the negative aspect of the Self-item or the Other-item is deleted. The appraisal meaning relating to the Self-item or the Other-item in the TT is upgraded compared with the appraisal meaning conveyed by the Attitude epithet in the ST. The frequency of the zero translation strategy to the positive or the negative epithets is thus allocated to the frequency of stance downgraded or stance upgraded accordingly. As is explained in the above, the categorisation of the three different types of stance variations within the sub-system of Attitude is based on the dimension of the polarity of the Attitude epithets and the translation strategies applied to them. The data for the variations of stance are recalculated on the basis of the data of the English translation of the Attitude epithets. The data for both the Self- and the Other-categories are further analysed with statistical significance test. Table 5.77 illustrates the variations of stance in the system of Attitude with the three types of variations, i.e., stance equalled, stance upgraded, and stance downgraded. These data are to be included into those of the other two sub-categories of Appraisal System, i.e., Engagement and Graduation, for further statistical comparison between the Self-category and the Other-category. Table 5.77 Variations of stance in Attitude in Self- and Other-categories

Translation Country

Stance equalled

Stance upgraded

Stance downgraded

Self

1957

10

167

Other

256

7

8

5.2 Variations of Stance Through Translating Appraisal Epithets

155

5.2.2 Variations of Stance Through Translating Engagement Epithets The system of Engagement is to illustrate the text producers’ engagement with other voices or viewpoints. The English translation of the Engagement epithets might represent a change of the producers’ tolerance of other voices rather than obvious stance shifts. Specifically, the English translation of a contractive Engagement epithet into an expansive one, for example, does not indicate a clear shift of stance such as stance upgraded or downgraded towards Self or Others from the ST to the TT, but the text producer’s acceptance of other voices about the proposition related to Self or Others. However, of note is that the linguistic realisation of deny, the sub-category of dialogical contraction in the Engagement system, is through the use of negation. To some extent, deny epithets change the stance conveyed by their co-occurring Attitude epithets or Graduation epithets into an opposite polarity. Extract 4.48, which reads “[[ 美国]]公民并没有真正享有平等的选举权” [American citizens have never really enjoyed common and equal suffrage], exemplifies this point. In Extract 4.48, the text producer uses a denial epithet “没有” [not] in the ST, which denies the fact that “American citizens have really enjoyed common and equal suffrage”. Though the polarity of “真正”, the Graduation epithet, is regarded as positive, the addition of “没 有” changes its positive polarity into a negative one. The translation of the appraisal epithets in the sub-category of deny thus has to be taken into account when dealing with the variations of stance in terms of the English translations of the Attitude epithets and the Graduation epithets. The deny epithets are singled out and the frequency of the translation strategies applied to them are also identified and calculated, which is shown in Table 5.78. Table 5.78 shows that the use of the equivalent translation strategy occupies the largest share of the total, while no case of the zero translation strategy applied to the deny epithets is identified. As the equivalent translation strategy is considered to have achieved stance equalled, the frequency of the equivalent translation strategy to the deny epithets is regarded as the frequency of stance equalled due to the English translation of these deny epithets. The other two translation strategies have to be taken into account, i.e., the upshifting and the down-shifting translation strategies. As Table 5.78 shows, there are nine cases of the deny epithets in the Self-category that are translated through the up-shifting translation strategy and these nine deny epithets are followed by the Table 5.78 Translation of the deny epithets in Self- and Other-categories Translation

Equivalent T

Up-shifting T

Down-shifting T

Zero T

Polarity

Pos

Neg

Pos

Pos

Pos

Neg

Neg

Neg

Self

37

76

0

9

2

0

0

0

Others

40

12

0

0

0

2

0

0

156 Table 5.79 Variations of stance in deny in Self- and Other-categories

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance Translation Country

Stance equalled

Stance upgraded

Stance downgraded

Self

113

11

0

Other

52

0

2

appraisal resources with negative polarity. In terms of the down-shifting translation strategy, there are two deny epithets followed by the positive appraisal resources in the Self-category and another two deny epithets co-occurring with the negative appraisal epithets in the Other-category. The English translations of the nine deny epithets are regarded as the cases of stance upgraded because the negative polarity of the following co-occurring lexical items is negated—the negative polarity of their collocates is turned into positive—and the negations are rendered into the TTs with the up-shifting translation strategy, which means that the positive appraisal meaning is upgraded in the TTs. The down-shifting translation of the two deny epithets that collocate with the epithets with positive polarity are also regarded as the cases of stance upgraded since the combination of the deny epithets and the positive epithets creates negative appraisal meaning and the application of the down-shifting translation strategy makes the negative appraisal meaning less negative, and thus, relatively speaking, tends to be upgraded in the TTs compared with the STs. As for the two deny epithets in the Other-category, the application of the down-shifting translation strategy makes the stance downgraded in the TTs because these two cases of deny epithets turn the negative polarity of the co-occurring epithets into positive and the positive appraisal meaning is shifted downwards in the TTs. The variations of stance through the English translation of the deny epithets are displayed in Table 5.79. Since the Engagement system is co-working with the Attitude system and the Graduation system, the additive effect of the English translation of the deny epithets that contributes to the variations of stance is to be transferred to the variations of stance from the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the other two sub-categories of Appraisal System.

5.2.3 Variations of Stance Through Translating Graduation Epithets As for the variations of the stance in the Graduation system, the sub-categories of force and focus are analysed all together. Specifically, the sharpen focus epithets are merged together with the up-scaling force epithets while the soften focus epithets conjoin the down-scaling force epithets, which means that the Graduation epithets are divided into only two groups: the up-scaling Graduation epithets or the downscaling Graduation epithets. This also agrees with the description of the Graduation system suggested by Martin and White (2005: 154). The following discussion of the

5.2 Variations of Stance Through Translating Appraisal Epithets

157

variations of stance in the Graduation system is applied to the English translation of all Graduation epithets without taking into account the classification of force or focus. In the Graduation system, the identification of the three types of stance variations centres around three dimensions: translation strategies, the positive or negative polarity of the Graduation epithets, and the up-scaling or down-scaling polarity of the Graduation epithets. The process of this identification is maintained consistently for both the Self- and the Other-categories. In terms of the equivalent translation strategy, the Graduation epithets in this category, regardless of being positive or negative, up-scaling or down-scaling, are all considered as stance equalled since they have projected the same stance in the TTs as they do in the STs. The frequency of the Graduation epithets that are translated with the equivalent translation strategy is recorded as the frequency of stance equalled in the Graduation system. As for the up-shifting translation strategy, there are four different situations of stance variations around the two dimensions of the polarity of positivity or negativity and the up-scaling or down-scaling polarity. The first situation is that a Graduation epithet is an up-scaling one and at the same time it is also a positive one. If it is translated with the up-shifting translation strategy, the stance towards Self or Others is upgraded. The image of Self or Others in the TT is upgraded compared with that in the ST. The frequency of this epithet is counted in the frequency of stance upgraded. The second situation is that a Graduation epithet is still an up-scaling epithet, but a negative epithet. If this epithet is translated with the up-shifting translation strategy, the stance towards Self or Others is actually downgraded in the TT and thus the image of Self or Others is not as good as they are in the ST. So it is considered as stance downgraded and thus its frequency is part of the frequency of stance downgraded. The third situation is that a Graduation epithet is a positive epithet but at the same time a down-scaling one. If it is translated with the up-shifting translation strategy, it means that the stance towards Self or Others is downgraded in the TT compared with the ST since the positivity of Self- or Others is softened and its positive image is thus moving towards the polarity of negativity. This situation leads to stance downgraded. The last situation in terms of the up-shifting translation strategy is that a Graduation epithet is a down-scaling epithet but at the same time a negative one. The stance towards Self or Others in the TT is upgraded compared with the stance towards Self or Others in the ST. This situation is thus regarded as stance upgraded. The frequency of this epithet is counted in the frequency of stance upgraded. Similarly, there are four different situations in terms of the down-shifting translation strategy. If a Graduation epithet is a positive and up-scaling epithet and is translated with the strategy of down-shifting translation, the translation of this epithet is identified as stance downgraded. If a Graduation epithet is a positive but down-scaling epithet, the application of the down-shifting translation strategy to it makes stance upgraded. If a Graduation epithet is a negative and up-scaling epithet, the downshifting translation of it also produces stance upgraded. If a Graduation epithet is a negative and down-scaling epithet, the application of the down-shifting translation

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5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

strategy to it reaches stance downgraded in the TT. The frequencies of the variations of stance are calculated accordingly in terms of the down-shifting translation strategy. As far as the zero translation strategy is concerned, four different situations are also identified. If a positive and up-scaling Graduation epithet is translated with the zero translation strategy, the positive stance towards Self or Others is downgraded in the TT in contrast with the stance towards Self or Others illustrated by this Graduation epithet in the ST. This also causes the downgrading of the image of Self or Others in the TT. So the zero translation of the Graduation epithets of this kind is regarded as stance downgraded. If a Graduation epithet is a positive one but at the same time a down-scaling Graduation epithet, the application of the zero translation strategy to it leads to an effect that the positive image of Self or Other is kept in the TT because the down-scaling meaning is reduced in the process of translation. Therefore, stance upgraded is shaped through the strategy of zero translation. The third situation is when a Graduation epithet is negative and up-scaling. The zero translation of such a Graduation epithet produces stance upgraded because the negativity of Self or Others which is up-scaled in the ST is not upgraded in the TT, which means that the negative image of Self or Others is not highlighted and thus to some extent Self or Others is presented less negatively in the TT compared with the way they are profiled in the ST. The application of the zero translation strategy to a Graduation epithet that is negative and down-scaling shapes stance downgraded because the down-scaling Graduation of the negativity is removed during the process of translation, thus the negativity is not down-scaled in the TT. This means that the negative image of Self or Others is upgraded if compared with the ST. The frequencies in terms of the zero translation strategy are allocated to the different categories based on the above identification of stance variations. The variations of stance in the Graduation system as a whole for both the Selfand the Other-categories are presented in Table 5.80. As is mentioned above, a conjunctive relation is projected among the three subcategories of Appraisal System. Similar to the treatment of the Engagement system, the variations of stance through the English translation of the Graduation epithets are to be covered in the additive effects of the stance variations from the English translation of Appraisal System as a whole. Table 5.80 Variations of stance in Graduation in Selfand Other-categories

Translation Country

Stance equalled

Stance upgraded

Stance downgraded

Self

1968

61

201

Other

376

41

27

5.2 Variations of Stance Through Translating Appraisal Epithets

159

5.2.4 Variations of Stance Through Translating Appraisal Epithets in Total By calculating all the data in the three sub-categories of Appraisal System, the variations of stance from the English translation of all the appraisal epithets in the Chinese-English parallel corpus of political discourse are illustrated in Table 5.81. As the Chi-square test results (χ2 = 61.603, p > .05) in Table 5.82 indicate, there is a significant correlation between country category and the variations of stance, which means that the variations of stance towards the Self-items and the Other-items are significantly different through the translators’ mediation during the process of English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. Surprisingly, the frequency of stance upgraded accounts for only 2% of its total in the Self-category while the frequency of stance upgraded occupies 6% in the Othercategory; and the frequency of stance downgraded totals 8% of the whole share in the Self-category while the frequency of stance downgraded in the Other-category reaches 5% of its total. A more striking contrast is found when the ratios of the frequency of stance downgraded to that of stance upgraded are compared between the Self-category and the Other-category. The ratio for the Self-category is 449% while the ratio for the Other-category is only 77%. Such a result suggests that the translators’ mediation of the STs and the TTs contributes to a discursive fact that a more negative stance towards China and a more positive stance towards other countries are reshaped through the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. Table 5.81 Variations of stance in Self- and Other-categories

Translation Country

Stance equalled

Stance upgraded

Stance downgraded

Self

4038

82

368

Other

684

48

37

Table 5.82 Variations of stance between Self- and Other-categories Chi-Square tests Value χ2

df

Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)

61.603a

2

.000

Likelihood ratio

50.380

2

.000

Linear-by-linear association

1.217

1

.270

No. of valid cases

5257

Pearson

a0

cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 19.02

160

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

5.3 Theoretical Account for Translation Shifts and Variations of Stance This section is primarily concerned with the discussion of the research results. It is a common sense that translation is by no means separated from the social-cultural context where it occurs. Since all social practices inevitably involve certain social members and social settings, it means the production of the translated texts and the translation process are in no way immune to the influence from the social members who participate in the social practice of translation and from the social settings where the social practice of translation occurs. “As a special social practice, translation is not only subject to the communicative purposes of the involved translation participants and the power relations between them, but also influenced by the mainstream ideology of the society in which translation is undertaken and the political stance of the translators themselves” (Hu et al. 2018: 31). It is safe to say that translation, also a discursive social practice, is an ideology-driven process since “discourse meaning, as constructed during production or comprehension, is liable to embody opinions that derive from underlying ideologies” (van Dijk 1995). As mentioned in Chapter 3, it is assumed that the Ideological Square of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation not only occurs in Chinese political discourse, but also is pervasive in the social practice of the translation process. However, as can be seen from the research results, this structure of ideology is not fully applicable to the translation process though it is the case in Chinese political texts as the STs. Translation shifts do occur and these translation shifts occur in a pattern that stance towards Self is downgraded while stance towards Others are upgraded in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. We will discuss the research results in relation to the linguistic differences between Chinese and English, politeness principles, and the Ideological Square Model.

5.3.1 A Linguistic Account Translation of Chinese political discourse into English obviously involves the use of two languages, i.e., Chinese and English, which belong to different language families. Chinese and English thus have typological differences and “Chinese differs from English in many ways” (Pan 1997: 10). Such differences between the SL and the TL offer a sound account for the translation shifts and then the variations of stance in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. The influences of language differences on the translation of the appraisal epithets pertain mostly to the linguistic units at the lexical level, particularly the collocation features

5.3 Theoretical Account for Translation Shifts and Variations of Stance

161

of lexical items. Extracts from 5.1 to 5.3 illustrate the influences of the language differences that cause translation shifts. Extract 5.1 ST … [[中国]] 能源 供应 潜力 仍然 很 大 … TT … The potential of its domestic energy supply is still great … Extract 5.2 ST … 由于 发表 不同 政治 观点, [[美国]] 记者 失业 的 情况 很 常见 … TT … It is frequent that journalists in the U. S. lose their jobs because of “politically incorrect” opinions … Extract 5.3 ST … [[中国]] 温室 气体 历史 排放量 很 低 … TT … Historically, China’s greenhouse gas emissions have been very low … As is shown in Extract 5.1, “大” [great] is used to highlight that China still has great potential for domestic supply of energy against the background that China is under criticism as the largest commuter of energy in the world and thus causes the largest share of pollution. “很” [very], as an upward Graduation resource, is employed to upgrade the strength of “大”. In Extract 5.2, “很” in the ST is used to modify “常 见” [frequently seen] to degrade the image of the United States by emphasising the fact that journalists are frequently fired in the United States if they publicise different political views. However, “很” are not translated in neither of these two examples. However, the word “很” in Chinese is experiencing a process of semantic devolution as Zhang (2010: 39) describes that “when using “很”, the speaker usually does not aim to stress the degree of a certain state but to fit in rhythm or make a clause a full one”. “很” in many cases is thus not used to highlight the degree of semantic strength and does not in essence influence the convey of meaning. But it sounds unidiomatic in Chinese if “很” is deleted in all the above three examples, which indicates that “ 很” is often necessary because of the syntactical and phonetic requirement but not because of semantic need in Chinese. Words of this kind often cause difficulties in translation because they are often semantically arbitrary in the degrees of meaning intensification. This is in line with Liu and Hu (2014) which argues that “because of the uncertainty of the degree scope of intensifiers, translators find it in an intangible situation to ascertain the degree of them in the source text”. This is particularly the case in the English translation of Extract 5.1 when compared with Extract 5.3 where “很” is translated into “very” to highlight “低” [low]. Therefore, the application of the zero translation strategy to “很” in Extracts 5.1 and 5.2 might probably attribute

162

5 Translation Patterns of Appraisal Epithets and Variations of Stance

to the usage of “很” in the language of Chinese. This can also be supported by the frequency of the translation strategies applied to “很” in the Chinese-English parallel corpus of political discourse. There are six times of the use of the zero translation strategy and only one time of the equivalent translation strategy that is applied to “ 很” in the Self-category while there are four times of “很” in the Other-category that are all translated with the zero translation strategy. Differences between Chinese and English with respect to the collocational patterns of the lexical items can also account for the shifts in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. The linguistic fact that two words often co-occur in the Chinese context cannot guarantee that their English equivalents can collocate with each other in English. This can be illustrated by Extracts 5.4 and 5.5. Extract 5.4 ST … [[中国]] 基本 扫除 青壮年 文盲 … TT … China has achieved the elimination of illiteracy among young and middle-aged people … Extract 5.4, in literary translation, shall be rendered into Chinese as “China has basically eliminated illiteracy among young and middle-aged people”, or in another way, as “China has achieved a basic elimination of illiteracy among young and middle-aged people”. However, as can be seen in Extract 5.4, “基本” [basically] is not translated in the TT. Here the key lies in whether the word “basically” collocates with the word “eliminate” in English. According to Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, “eliminate” is defined as “to completely get rid of something that is unnecessary or unwanted” (emphasis added), which means the word “eliminate” entails the sememe of “completely” and thus semantically conflicts with the word “basically”. In order to make the statement sound, the search of the co-occurring pattern of “basically” and “eliminate*” is conducted in both the British National Corpus (hereafter BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (hereafter COCA). The results show that there is no case of such occurring pattern in BNC and only ten cases in COCA with a size of more than 520 million words. The search results at least indicate that it is not a case that these two words often collocate in English texts. And after a careful reading of the ten concordances in COCA, it is found that those ten cases of the co-occurring pattern of “basically” and “eliminate*” are mostly quotations from the non-English native speakers. For example, Saakashvili, the former president of the Republic of Georgia, is quoted as saying that “we basically managed to crack down on corruption and to basically eliminate the issue of corruption”. That is to say, the fact that the meaning of “基本” is not transferred into the TT might be because of the differences between Chinese and English

5.3 Theoretical Account for Translation Shifts and Variations of Stance

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at the collocation level. Another example is “适度” [moderately; appropriately] and “调整” [adjust] in Extract 5.5. Extract 5.5 ST … [[中国]] 根据 国情 适度 调整 了 对外 援助 的 规模 布局 … TT … China adjusted the scale, arrangement, structure and sectors of its foreign aid in accordance with its actual conditions … The co-occurring pattern of “适度” and “调整” is a frequently used collocation in Chinese, particularly in Chinese political discourse. However, the English equivalents of “适度” and “调整”, i.e., moderately/appropriately and adjust, do not co-occur very often with each other. A search in COCA returns no occurrence of the collocational pattern of “moderately adjust*” or “appropriately adjust*”. It is worthy of mention that a more detailed investigation of the co-selection system and the extended units of meaning could reveal more profound clues for the linguistic explanation of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. However, the investigation in this study has already shown that language differences between Chinese and English are certainly an important factor that contributes to the research results and can at least partially account for the translation shifts and the variations of stance.

5.3.2 A Politeness Account The strategy of politeness is adopted here to explain the research results. For one thing, “politeness is a social phenomenon–and yet a social phenomenon largely manifested through the use of language” (Leech 2014: ix) and translation involves the use of languages and also manifests politeness in this cross-cultural communication. To some extent, translation as a social practice is thus restrained from the principles of politeness, among other social norms. For another, politeness finds itself in line with van Dijk’s ideological polarisation of in-group and out-group as “politeness concerns a relationship between two participants who we may call self and other” (Leech 1983: 131). Politeness is a key means by which humans work out and maintain interpersonal relationships (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 1). Brown (2001: 11620) also emphasises, “since politeness is crucial to the construction and maintenance of social relationships, politeness in communication goes to the very heart of social life and interaction; indeed it is probably a precondition for human cooperation in general”. As an important issue in social life, the phenomenon of politeness has attracted much attention from various academic fields. It is generally accepted that there are two waves of classic approaches in the previous studies of politeness. The first wave of approaches focuses on the linguistic forms representing politeness, the principles and the strategies of politeness. A typical representative is the Principle of Politeness,

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specifically the paired maxims proposed by Leech (1983: 132). The second wave of approaches is marked by a discursive turn, i.e., “post-2000 discursive theories of politeness” (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 52), which focuses on the evaluation of politeness from the participants’ perspective. Though the first wave of politeness theory is often under severe criticism (e.g., Watts 2003), there is no systematic account of the phenomenon of politeness that has been created to replace them and “many of the underlying assumptions and concepts in those first-wave approaches to politeness continue to exist in various guises in more recently developed frameworks” (Kádár and Haugh 2013: 5). Among those newly developed frameworks, the General Strategy of Politeness by Leech (2014), on the basis of the Principle of Politeness (Leech 1983), provides a sound model for politeness and is adopted in our study to explain the research results from the corpus-based translation data. The General Strategy of Politeness is stated as follows: “in order to be polite, S expresses or implies meanings that associate a favourable value with what pertains to O or associates an unfavourable value with what pertains to S (S = self, speaker; O = other, hearer or a third party)” (Leech 2014: 90). Within the overarching constraint of the General Strategy of Politeness, pairs of Other-oriented and Self-oriented maxims are proposed (Table 5.83). Table 5.83 The component maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness (Leech 2014: 91) Maxims (expressed in an Related pair of imperative mood) maxims

Label for this maxim

Typical speech-event type(s)

(M1) give a high value to Generosity, Tact O’s wants

Generosity

Commissives

(M2) give a low value to S’s wants

Tact

Compliments

(M3) give a high value to Approbation, O’s qualities Modesty

Approbation

Compliments

(M4) give a low value to S’s qualities

Modesty

Self-devaluation

(M5) give a high value to Obligation S’s obligation to O

Obligation (of S to O)

Apologizing, thanking

(M6) give a low value to O’s obligation to S

Obligation (of O to S)

Responses to thanks and apologies

(M7) give a high value to Opinion O’s opinions

Agreement

Agreeing, disagreeing

(M8) give a low value to S’s opinions

Opinion reticence

Giving opinions

(M9) give a high value to Feeling O’s feelings

Sympathy

Congratulating, commiserating

(M10) give a low value to S’s feelings

Feeling reticence

Suppressing feelings

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Two points need to be stressed about the General Strategy of Politeness. Firstly, the core of politeness is to depreciate Self and respect Other in order to minimise the implication of distance and reach rapport. This is in line with Leech’s earlier statement that “politeness is focused more strongly on other than on self” (1983: 133). As Leech (2014: 3) later argues, “what it means to be polite, I will argue, is to speak or behave in such a way as to (appear to) give benefit or value not to yourself but to the other person(s)”. Secondly, regulative aspect of politeness is emphasised. Politeness is a social phenomenon, which exerts its normative constraints on each individual within a social community (Gu 1990). However, it shall also be kept in mind, as Leech (1983: 133) reminds, that these maxims are observed to a certain degree, rather than as absolute rules. These two points of the General Strategy of Politeness shed new lights on the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories in Chinese political discourse. Firstly, the translators might translate, to some extent, Self’s negative aspects and other’s positive aspects in order to present China, viz. the Self-items, as a personified polite figure. Secondly, the General Strategy of Politeness imposes certain normative constraints on the English translation of Chinese political discourse as a social practice. The translators of the Chinese political discourse, as social members, are subject to the maxims of politeness though they do not fully comply with these polite maxims and not every one of the translators sticks to them. In this way, the General Strategy of Politeness offers a reasonable perspective for the translation shifts and the variations of stance. Extracts 5.6 and 5.7 illustrate the constraints of the General Strategy of Politeness imposed on the translators. Extract 5.6 ST … [[中国]] 是 一个 生物 多样性 非常 丰富 的 国家 … TT … China is a country rich in biodiversity … Extract 5.7 ST … 中国 坚持 从 国情 出发, 在 承继 [[中国]] 传统 法律 文化 优秀 成果, 借鉴 人类 法治 文明 的 基础 上, 探索 建立 并 不断 完善 中国 特色 社会主义 司法 制度 … TT … China, proceeding from its national conditions, carrying on the achievements of Chinese traditional legal culture and learning from other civilizations regarding their rule of law, has been building and improving its socialist judicial system with Chinese characteristics, safeguarding social justice and making significant contributions to the rule of law of the mankind … Extracts 5.6 and 5.7 display the translators’ adherence to the maxim of modesty that requires giving a low value to Self’s qualities. In Extract 5.6, China, a Self-item, is described as a country which is “非常丰富” [very rich] with respect to biodiversity

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in the ST. However, as can be seen, “非常” [very] is not rendered into the TT, which indicates that compared to the ST, the TT conveys a meaning that mitigates the degree of richness of the biodiversity of China. That is to say, the translator, restricted by the maxim of modesty, mediates the Chinese political text and its translation in order to project China as a polite personified country by not translating “非常” into “very” and contributing to a more moderate description of China. A similar case is Extract 5.7, where “[[中国]]传统法律文化优秀成果” is translated into English as “the achievements of Chinese traditional legal culture” with “优秀” [excellent] not translated in the TT. After a search in COCA, it is found that “achievement” co-occurs with many adjectives similar to “excellent” like “great”, “outstanding”, “extraordinary”, “remarkable”, which means the collocational pattern of “excellent” with “achievement” is idiomatic in English. In this sense, the omission of “优秀” in the TT has no linguistic ground but can be assumed to be constrained by the General Strategy of Politeness which requires to give a low value to Self’s qualities. Extract 4.47 is another interesting example to illustrate the constraints imposed on the translator from the maxim of approbation. In the Extract 4.47—2010年 [[ 美国]] 强奸案被捕率仅 仅为 24% [In 2010, the arrest rate for rape was 24 percent in the U. S.], “仅”[only], as a down-scaling force epithet, negatively appraises the United States as its arrest rate for rape, a kind of crime that is not only illegal but also morally condemned in China, is as low as 24%. By relocating its context, it is found in Human Rights Record of the United States in 2012 issued by the Chinese government, a response to the criticism of China’s human rights in Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2012 by the US government. The use of “仅” implies that the arrest rate for rape is expected to be much higher, say, 90% or 100%, and as many as 76% of the perpetrators have not been arrested. This is to the Chinese people a serious human rights problem because the victims have not been protected and those who caused their sufferings have not been punished. Here the clause that “the arrest rate for rape was 24 percent” is also a relational clause, where the higher the value is, the more positive the attitude becomes in the clause. Hence, “仅” as a down-scaling force epithet in the ST obviously contributes to an effect that the quantification of the arrest rate in the United States is dragged back towards the low polarity and the negative attitude towards the United States is increased. However, the translator adopted the zero translation strategy, which discursively makes the attitude towards the United States less negative because the value of “24%” itself in the TT does not convey a clear negative attitude. Given the advanced language proficiency of those involved in the translation and the multiple rounds of proofreading and editing performed in this institutional translation, it becomes highly likely the case that zero translation was deliberately used to deal with “仅”. One of the assumptions is that as an institutionised member of the Chinese government, the translator, together with other participants involved in the translation, is constrained by the maxim of approbation to give a high value to Other, here the United States, within his/her own power in translation. Such assumption is supported by the principle of China’s diplomatic policy for the development of China-US relationship, i.e., “building a cooperative partnership between China and the United States with mutual respect and mutual benefit” in US-China Joint Statement issued in 2011.

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Though China and the United States have some conflicts due to historical, political, and ideological differences, China-US relationship tends to be friendly and cooperative in general, at least from China’s perspective. Therefore, the application of the zero translation strategy to “仅” here is a result required by the General Strategy of Politeness to, as far as translation can do, maintain the cooperative relationship between China and the United States. The maxim of obligation, which states as giving a high value of Self’s obligation to Other while giving a low value to Other’s obligation to Self, also operates in the process of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. Extract 5.8 ST … 多 年 来 [[中国]] 力所能及 地 提供 无私 援助, 帮助 发展中国家 不断 增 强 自主 发展 的 能力 … TT … For many years, China has provided assistance within its capacity to other developing countries to help them build the capacity for self-development as well as engage in common development … Extract 5.9 ST … 报告 说, 原因 可能 在 于 2012年 农历 春节 期间 [[美国]] 国家 安全 局 非 法 监听 访 美 的 中国 公民 大量 通话 信息 … TT … The report suggested that this was probably because of NSA eavesdropping on Chinese citizens who visited the U. S. during Chinese Spring Festival at the beginning of the year … In Extract 5.8, “无私帮助”, which is supposed to be rendered into “selfless assistance” that China provides to other developing countries, is simply translated into “assistance” with “无私” [selfless] being not translated. By doing so, the translator creates in a sense a fact that other developing countries do not have to have a feeling of owing to China that much and thus gives a low value to Other’s obligation to Self. By contrast, the act of “非法” [illegally] eavesdropping of the intelligent department of the United States, an Other-item, on the Chinese citizens is not conveyed in the TT. This means that the translator mitigates the higher degree of the guiltiness that the United States should feel since it did something illegal. Abiding by the maxim of obligation, the translator reduces the word in the TT that would otherwise make Other feel more obligated to Self.

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5.3.3 An Ideological Account From the data analysis of this study, it can be argued that the discursive dichotomy of the Self-category and the Other-category and the current Ideological Square Model cannot explain the translation shifts with respect to the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse and the variations of stance from the STs to the TTs. This book therefore proposes a revised version of the Ideological Square Model for the taxonomy of the discursive presentations of Self and Others. Before discussing the new proposed model, it is necessary to revisit the original version of the Ideological Square Model (van Dijk 1998: 267; 2006). a. b. c. d.

Express/emphasise information that is positive about Us. Express/emphasise information that is negative about Them. Suppress/de-emphasise information that is positive about Them. Suppress/de-emphasise information that is negative about Us.

In short, such model displays the usual structure of ideology, viz. positive selfpresentation versus negative other-presentation, as van Dijk (1998: 267) argues that “these four moves, … obviously play a role in the broader contextual strategy of positive self-presentation or face-keeping and its outgroup corollary, ‘negative otherpresentation’”. This model offers a sound framework for the investigation of the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse because the English translation of Chinese political discourse conveying China’s ideological stance is also an ideology-governed discursive social practice and such framework can help reveal the ideological polarisation of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation represented in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. However, by analysing the variations of stance through the translation shifts, it is found that the translators tend to project the Self-items in a downgrading way and the Other-items in an upgrading way in the TTs compared with those in the STs, which is an unexpected result that conflicts with the original Ideological Square Model. A series of questions arise as to why the shifts in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse do not fit in the usual structure of ideology and represented by the Ideological Square Model, what makes translation a deviation from the Ideological Square Model, and what ideological motivation is behind such a deviation. Such a conflicting result and those daunting questions lead to our proposal of a revised Ideological Square Model. We argue that the General Strategy of Politeness shall be taken into account in the ideological polarisation of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation in that it provides a sound account for the translation shifts and the stance variations where the Self-items are negatively presented while the Other-items are upgraded in the TTs compared with the STs. As is discussed in Sect. 5.3.2, the core of the General Strategy of Politeness is to depreciate Self and respect Other in order to minimise the implication of distance and reach rapport. This is reflected by the translation data with respect to the English translation of

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Fig. 5.1 The Ideological Square constrained by the General Strategy of Politeness

the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. This implies that the translators, as the members of a social community, would adhere to the maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness and thus render China, as the speaker, i.e., Self, into a polite figure. The maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness have certain normative influence on the translators as Gu (1990) argues “politeness is a phenomenon belonging to the level of society, which endorses its normative constraints on each individual”. We therefore propose that the general structure of the ideological polarisation of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation is restricted by the General Strategy of Politeness, which is illustrated in Fig. 5.1. In Fig. 5.1, negative other-presentation is represented by the colour of deep gray while positive self-presentation is marked by the colour of white. The Ideological Square Model is illustrated by a square where Self is positively presented and Others are negatively presented in most cases. The General Strategy of Politeness is illustrated by a circle outside of the Ideological Square to show its constraints on the polarisation of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. Because of the constraints of the General Strategy of Politeness, there are cases of the opposite patterns of the ideological polarisation, i.e., presenting Self negatively and presenting Others positively, as the translation data display in the present study. This is illustrated by some small white-coloured circles to represent positive otherpresentation within the sphere of negative other-presentation in deep grey and some small deep-greyed circles to represent negative self-presentation within the sphere of positive self-presentation. The bottom left half circle of the General Strategy of Politeness, here politeness in the figure, is painted white and the upper right half one deep grey with an aim to show the constraints of the General Strategy of Politeness on the Ideological Square, which allows some translators to present Self natively

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and Others positively in order to make China, the Self, more polite. Such figure also illustrates the differences between individual membership and group membership that “individual members on some dimension may not identify with the group, and hence not share the ideology of the group” (van Dijk 1998: 71). This theoretical argument also echoes the fact that some individual translators adopt translation shifts and thus make the stance in the STs changed in the TTs. As discussed above, the maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness have certain normative restrictions on the translators as social members, yet are not absolute rules that every social member has to abide by. In this case, such question arises as what ideological motivation is behind the translators’ not abiding by the General Strategy of Politeness and thus causes more negative presentation of China and more positive presentation of other countries in the English translated discourse. Clearly, this pattern of more negative discursive presentation of China and more positive discursive presentation of other countries in the English translation of Chinese political discourse conflicts with the Ideological Square of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation governed by the self-serving principle. If the English translation of Chinese political discourse is governed by ideology and the TTs reflect this ideology, it behoves the translators to present China in a positive way, if not a more positive way, and other countries in a negative manner, if not a more negative manner. However, the research results show that China is more negatively presented and other countries are more positively presented in the TTs. This conflict can only be resolved by assuming that there are two layers of the Ideological Square Model. We assume that translation data that show a picture of negative self-presentation and positive other-presentation at discursive level is only a superficial layer of the Ideological Square within the governing sphere of the General Strategy of Politeness and there exists an even broader sphere governed by the ideological self-serving principle to cover this superficial layer of the Ideological Square. We thus distinguish the two layers of the Ideological Square. One is the superficial layer of the Ideological Square and the other is the deep layer of the Ideological Square. One difference between them is that while the superficial layer of the Ideological Square is clearly demonstrated through linguistic devices at the discursive level, the deep layer of the Ideological Square is grounded or projected backwards through discursive devices at the social-cultural level. Another difference is that while there are situations where Self is presented negatively and Other is presented positively at the superficial layer of the Ideological Square, the Ideological Square Model still operates to positively present Self and negatively present Others at the deep layer. This means that there are possibilities at the superficial layer of the Ideological Square that Self is presented negatively and Other is presented positively, but such possibilities are fully denied at the deep layer. The deep layer of the Ideological Square is governed by the selfserving principle of ideology. To put in other words, though the translation data display, discursively speaking, that those Self-items are presented negatively while those Other-items are positively presented through translation shifts, this result still demonstrates the deeper layer of the Ideological Square governed by the self-serving principle with an ultimate goal of protecting the interests of Self.

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Based on the above argument, we propose a revised version of the Ideological Square Model where two layers of the Ideological Squares are distinguished, i.e., the superficial layer of the Ideological Square and the deeper layer of the Ideological Square, with two governing principles, i.e., the General Strategy of Politeness and the self-serving principle, constraining their operations, respectively. This is illustrated in Fig. 5.2. As is shown in Fig. 5.2, the superficial layer of the Ideological Square is circled and constrained by the General Strategy of Politeness, which offers a sound explanation for the possibility, at the discursive level, of an opposite ideological structure of positive other-presentation and negative self-presentation. However, it is within the deeper layer of the Ideological Square, which is circled and constrained by the governing ideological principle of self-serving. This means that the ideological pattern in the deeper layer of the Ideological Square is still in line with the ideological polarisation of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation because of the broader governing principle of self-serving, no matter how the superficial layer of the Ideological Square operates within the General Strategy of Politeness. This makes the Ideological Square Model more theoretically grounded and more explanatory, particularly for the translation data in this study. Back to the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse, the variations of stance towards Self and Others through translation shifts from the STs to the TTs can be attributed to the discursive demonstration of the superficial layer of the Ideological Square within the sphere of the General Strategy of Politeness. Because of the constraint of the General Strategy of Politeness, there is a discursive possibility that the stance towards Self is downgraded while the stance towards Others is upgraded in the TTs. However, the ultimate aim of the stance Fig. 5.2 A revised version of the Ideological Square Model

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variations is to profile Self, in this case China, as a polite figure, which in another sense is to help present Self in a positive way. This is illustrated by the deeper layer of the Ideological Square governed by the self-serving principle. The aim that the translators adopt translation shifts and thus contribute to the variations of stance in the TTs is still for the protection of the interests of Self. Extracts 5.10 and 5.11 are used to illustrate this revised Ideological Square Model. Extract 5.10 ST … 在 中国共产党 的 领导 下, 经过 新 中国 成立 56年 来 的 探索 和 奋斗, [[ 中国]] 彻底 改变 了 一穷二白 的 落后 面貌, 生产力 迅猛 发展, 综合国力 显著 增强, 人民 生活 明显 改善 … TT … Under the leadership of the CPC, after making a range of explorations and efforts over the past 56 years since the founding of New China, China has cast off its former state of abject poverty. Productivity has grown rapidly, overall national strength has increased greatly and people’s life has improved markedly … Extract 5.11 ST … [[中国]] 全面 参与 并 推动 了 全球 经济 治理 机制 的 改革 … TT … China has participated in and helped push forward the reform of the global economic governance mechanism … In Extract 5.10, “彻底”, as a Graduation epithet to upgrade China in the ST, is not rendered into English. It is supposed to be translated into the TT as “completely”, “thoroughly”, or “finally” as China finally changed its poverty state after so many years of hard work. Similarly, “全面” in Extract 5.11, which is supposed to be translated into “fully”, has not been translated. In order to examine the ways in which these items are used in English, searches in COCA have been carried out. According to COCA, the collocational patterns of “completely / thoroughly / finally cast off” and of “fully participate” do occur as in “Perhaps that was what made the Times finally cast off its inertia” and “Families and community members monitor the school’s accountability in relation to educational results and they fully participate in the decision-making process”, which means it is idiomatic to use the co-occurring patterns of “completely / thoroughly / finally cast off” and of “fully participate”. It is assumed that the omission of “finally” and “fully” in the TTs by the translators is due to their adherence to the maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness, which requires them to give low value to Self. Discursively, China is less positively presented in the TTs than it is in the STs, which implies a downgraded stance towards China—the Self—in the TTs within the superficial layer of the Ideological Square governed by the General Strategy of Politeness. However, such a downgraded stance towards China due to the constraints of the General Strategy of Politeness conflicts with the governing self-serving principle of

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ideology, which requires the translators to serve Self’s interests and in a broader scope covers the operation of the deeper layer of the Ideologue Square. It is thus assumed that such translation shifts and variations of stance towards China mediated by the translators have a deeper intention of serving China’s interests in the TTs within the sphere of the deeper layer of the Ideological Square to meet the requirement of the governing self-serving principle. This assumption can trace its evidence from China’s diplomatic policies, particularly those governing principles for the diplomatic relations established by Deng Xiaoping, the general designer of China’s Reform and Opening-up in later 1970s, and followed by the later generations of the leaders of China. These governing principles can be summarised and known as ‘Keep a low profile and make a contribution’.1 With respect to the translation shift in Extract 5.10, China always designates itself as the largest developing country in the world, as it is known to all. Such designation would lose its ground if China has finally cast off its poverty, which implies that China is a moderately developed country, if not a developed one. So the omission of “finally” indicates that China still faces some poverty problem and is still a developing country. As Deng Xiaoping requires for the top-rank Chinese officials, “we should not boast. The more developed we are, the more modest we should be” (Deng 2008/1993: 320). In this way, such translation shift helps ‘keep a low profile’ and will not “put the developed countries all the more on guard against us”. As for Extract 5.11, the translator adheres to the maxim of modesty of the General Strategy of Politeness to give low value to Self’s quality and does not express the meaning of “fully”, a word which in one sense indicates China’s active role in pushing forward the reform of the global economic governance mechanism, but at the same time can be interpreted as China’s wish to seek hegemony and a leadership for a new global economic system. Though the omission of the meaning of “fully” in the TT causes a downgraded stance towards China, such translation shift is in line with China’s diplomatic principle of making a contribution yet always keeping a low profile. In this way, China’s interests are protected. In a broader sense, the fact that the translators do not render the two Graduation epithets into the TTs discursively because of the constraint of the General Strategy of Politeness is attributed to their aim to ultimately achieve a purpose to positively present China within a deeper layer of the Ideological Square governed by the self-serving principle. 1 This

is summarised from Deng Xiaoping’s speeches from which some important extracts are listed as follows. “China will always side with the Third World countries, but we shall never seek hegemony over them or serve as their leader. Nevertheless, we cannot simply do nothing in international affairs; we have to make our contribution. In what respect? I think we should help promote the establishment of a new international political and economic order. We do not fear anyone, but we should not give offence to anyone either. We should act in accordance with the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and never deviate from them” (Deng 2008/1993: 363). “We should not criticize or condemn other countries without good reason or go to extremes in our words and deeds” (Deng 2008/1993: 320). “In short, my views about the international situation can be summed up in three sentences. First, we should observe the situation coolly. Second, we should hold our ground. Third, we should act calmly. Don’t be impatient; it is no good to be impatient. We should be calm and immerse ourselves in work pragmatically. We should focus on one thing -- our own thing” (Deng 2008/1993: 321).

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5.3.4 A Further Discussion On the basis of the above analysis, this section extends the discussion with respect to the specific research questions formulated and articulated in Chapter 1. These research questions are revisited here for further discussion. 1. To what extent are the appraisal epithets in the Self-category and the Othercategory in the Chinese STs shifted in the English TTs, respectively? The analysis of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse reveals a significant difference between the Self-category and the Othercategory. Although the equivalent translation strategy is the most frequently used one, in that this translation strategy accounts for the overwhelming majority of the total in both the Self- and the Other-categories, it is more probably applied to the appraisal epithets in the Self-category while more translation shifts occurred in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Other-category. This difference implies that the translators are more faithful to the STs when translating the appraisal epithets in the Self-category and more likely to make translation shifts in the process of translating the appraisal epithets in the Other-category. Indeed, translation shifts do exist with respect to the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse, which differs from the presupposition that the translators of Chinese political discourse should fully abide by the cardinal principle of ‘faithful to the original’ and not produce translation shifts (Cheng 2003; Wang 2011). Regarding the highest proportion of the equivalent translation strategy with respect to the English translation of the appraisal epithets, it is argued that the translators of Chinese political discourse, as the native speakers of Chinese and the institutionalised part of the Chinese government, place themselves in line with the Chinese government on the one hand; and, on the other, they limit themselves as mere language providers, sticking to the cardinal principle, i.e., being faithful to the STs, when translating Chinese political texts. It is also argued that translation is carried out in the particular social settings where the governing principle of self-serving and the General Strategy of Politeness have to be taken into account by the translators, which in a way explains their different translation decisions made for the appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories, i.e., being more faithful to the appraisal epithets in the Self-category and imposing manipulation on the appraisal epithets in the Other-category. 2. To what extent are the English translations of the positive and the negative appraisal epithets in the Self-category different from those in the Other-category? No significant difference is found between the Self-category and the Othercategory with respect to the English translation of all the positive appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. By contrast, a strikingly larger proportion of the negative epithets in the Other-category, compared with that of their counterparts in the Self-category, are translated with the non-equivalent translation strategies. Statistical data also show that there is no significant difference between the English translations of the positive epithets and the negative epithets in the Self-category, while

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a notable difference exits between the English translations of the positive epithets and the negative epithets in the Other-category with the non-equivalent translation strategies more frequently applied to the negative epithets. It is argued that this higher frequency of translation shifts in the English translation of the negative epithets in the Other-category, which is a main contributing factor to the variations of stance upgraded towards the Other-items, is the result of the translators’ manipulation governed by the General Strategy of Politeness and the self-serving principle in the social practice of translation in its particular setting. 3. To what extent is the Self-category different from the Other-category with respect to the English translation of the appraisal epithets in each of the sub-categories of Appraisal System, respectively? When it comes to the Attitude system, no difference between the Self-category and the Other-category has been found with respect to the translation strategies applied to the appraisal epithets in general. This is in line with Munday (2012), who suggests that translation shifts between Attitude categories are often relatively minor. Within the Self-category, however, statistical data show that, there is a higher probability that the positive Attitude epithets are translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies, which is mainly contributed from the application of the non-equivalent translation strategies to the positive appreciation epithets in the Self-category. This means that the translators tend to mitigate the positive description of China. Nevertheless, this pattern is largely limited to the description of events in China, i.e., the Self-items in terms of what is happening, but no much value judgment is made on its behaviour. Translation shifts of the Attitude epithets in Chinese political discourse found in this study can thus be grouped into two: (i) negative presentation of Self rather than Others; and (ii) toning down the positive description of the things of Self, i.e., the appreciation resources, instead of its behaviours, i.e., the judgement resources. However, due to the unbalanced data of the appraisal epithets as judgement resources, the contrastive studies on the English translations of the judgement epithets between the Self-category and the Other-category still remain unsolved within the scope of this study because appraisal epithets are less frequently working as judgement resources. As for the Engagement system, the appraisal epithets in the Self-category are rendered into English with the equivalent translation strategy while the nonequivalent translation strategies are more likely applied to the Engagement epithets in the Other-category. This shows that the translators express kind of reservations about exerting full control of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the STs, resulting in less translation shifts in the English translation of the Engagement epithets in the Self-category. This implies the unbalanced power relations among the translation participants in the English translation setting of Chinese political discourse where the translators are in most cases subordinate to the writers of the STs. At the same time, it also suggests that the translators have more freedom to manipulate the ST when translating the Engagement epithets in the Other-category. The analysis of the non-equivalent translation of the negative contractive epithets reveals that an overwhelming number of those in the Other-category are found,

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which contrasts with the number of those in the Self-category. It is also found that the positive contractive epithets, compared with the expansive ones, in the Self-category, are more likely to be translated with the non-equivalent translation strategies. This means that the appraisal epithets in the English translation process from the STs to the TTs have become less contractive when negatively presenting the Other-items or positively presenting the Self-items. This implies that the translators mediate the translation by inviting more voices to “endorse and to share with them the feelings, tastes or normative assessments they are announcing” (Martin and White 2005: 94), thus making the declared attitudes and stance dialogically directed towards aligning potential Self members in Other group into a Self-community of shared values. At the same time, it shows that the translators have more grounds and confidence to positively present China and negatively criticise part of the Other-items. On the other hand, it also implies that such translation shifts made by the translators of Chinese political discourse also accord with the maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness which require more praises to Others and more criticisms to Self. By applying the non-equivalent translation strategies to the contractive Engagement epithets, more dialogical space is created compared with the STs, making the TTs more polite. With respect to the Graduation system, a significant difference between the English translations of the appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories is found, and the Graduation epithets in the Other-category are slightly more translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies. Further statistical analyses of the English translation of the Graduation epithets also reveal that the positive down-scaling Graduation epithets in the Self-category are more translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies. Grammatically speaking, a large number of Graduation epithets are used to modify verbs that indicate the behaviours of the agents, i.e., the Self-items or the Other-items, and the translators tend to abase the negative presentation of Self when it comes to the English translation of the Graduation epithets that are related to the behaviours of Self, which echoes the English translation of the Attitude epithets. Different from the argument that “more generally, the intensity of graduation of both attitudinal and engagement values may tend to be downscaled” (Munday 2015), this study shows that a significant difference emerges when the translators deal with the Graduation epithets in the Self- and the Othercategories, specifically, the translators tend to up-scale the Graduation epithets in the Self-category in the TTs. This research also responses to Munday’s (2015) call for further testing the hypothesis and revealing how and under what conditions the opposite pattern may occur. 4. How the stances towards Self or Others are reshaped through the English translation of the appraisal epithets? As far as the variations of stance are concerned, the Self-items are more frequently downgraded in the TTs through the English translation of the appraisal epithets, thus making the positive stance towards the Self-items in the STs tend to be downgraded in the TTs while the Other-items more likely to be upgraded during the process of English translation. This indicates that a more positive stance towards other countries is reshaped in the TTs.

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One the one hand, it is argued that a friction exists between individual membership and group membership. The translation data show that though the majority of the Chinese translators abide by the cardinal principle of being faithful to the STs when translating Chinese political discourse, some translators still mediate the STs and the TTs to change the stance towards China and other countries, making the positively presented Self-items less prominent and the negatively presented Other-items more positively profiled in the TTs. This is in line with the previous argument that “individual members on some dimension may not identify with the group, and hence not share the ideology of the group” (van Dijk 1998: 71). On the other hand, it is also argued that the Self-items are not necessarily positively presented and the Other-items are not always negatively portrayed. On the contrary, the Other-items are in many cases presented in a positive way while the Self-items are often presented negatively. The self-serving principle and the General Strategy of Politeness offer a sound explanation for the variations of stance in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. In a social setting where being polite is social norm, particularly in a country like China that has Confucianism as the cornerstone of the traditional culture—whose thoughts lay heavy emphasis on public morality and social relationships—the translators would, consciously or unconsciously, take into account the maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness during their cross-cultural social activities in order to align with the readers and achieve rapport among the social members involved because the translators, as social actors, are also embedded in the culture. However, it shall never be neglected that the self-serving principle of ideology is the ultimate end of the social practice governed by ideology. Translation, as a social practice, is no exception. No matter how the stance is varied through translation shifts, such variations of stance do not harm Self’s interests and operate under the governing self-serving principle of ideology. Such a research finding is opposite to Pan (2015) which argues that the positive comments on the Chinese government are scaled up while the negative values are toned down in the news translation from other languages into Chinese. The direction of translation and the audience of the translation could largely account for these opposite research results. 5. What factors can account for the Chinese-English translation of the appraisal epithets related to the above research results? In general, most appraisal epithets are translated with an equivalent translation strategy in both the Self- and the Other-categories. The differences between the English translations of the appraisal epithets in the Self-category and the appraisal epithets in the Other-category are largely due to the application of the non-equivalent translation strategies to the appraisal epithets in the Other-category, particularly the negative ones. Such differences of the translation shifts thus further contribute to the variations of stance towards Self and Others from the STs to the TTs. It is argued that the governing self-serving principle and the General Strategy of Politeness could largely account for the above research results because the translators, as social members, are constrained by both of these two normative principles when translating the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse with a communicative

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purpose to achieve solidarity with the audience. A revised version of the Ideological Square Model is proposed in this book to explain the translation shifts and the stance variations identified in this study. Within this revised model, translation is considered as a social practice, and the translators are the social members who are constrained by the self-serving principle of ideology and the maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness in the particular social setting of translation, where they translate the appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories in Chinese political discourse in different manners, making the stance towards China less positive and the stance towards other countries less negative through translation shifts. It also argues that differences between languages and cultures are also important factors that cannot be neglected.

5.4 Summary In this chapter, we deal with the translation patterns in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse and the variations of stance towards China and other countries through the translators’ mediation of the STs and the TTs. Comparisons and statistical analyses around different parameters between the Self-category and the Other-category are conducted at both lexico-grammatical and discourse semantic levels with respect to the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. At the lexico-grammatical level, the main concern is the uses of the translation strategies—those applied to the appraisal epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories—that contribute to the shifts in the translation from Chinese into English. At the discourse semantic level, the focus is on the variations of stance through the English translation of the appraisal epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories. The key results are summarised as follows. 1. The equivalent translation strategy is the most frequently used one for both the Self- and the Other-categories. However, it tends to be applied more often to the appraisal epithets in the Self-category while more translation shifts occurred in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Other-category. 2. There is no significant difference between the Self-category and the Othercategory in terms of the English translation of all the positive appraisal epithets. By contrast, the non-equivalent translation strategies are strikingly more often used when it comes to the negative appraisal epithets in the Other-category than those in the Self-category. 3. No significant difference between the Self-category and the Other-category is identified with respect to the translation strategies applied to the appraisal epithets within the Attitude system. However, statistical analysis reveals that the positive Attitude epithets in the Self-category are more probably translated with the nonequivalent translation strategies, which is a result from the application of the non-equivalent translation strategies to the positive appreciation epithets in the Self-category.

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4. As for the Engagement epithets, the non-equivalent translation strategies are more likely applied to the Engagement epithets in the Other-category, particularly the negative contractive epithets. However, the positive contractive epithets in the Self-category, compared with their expansive counterparts, are more likely to be translated with the non-equivalent translation strategies. 5. In the system of Graduation, the appraisal epithets in the Other-category and the positive down-scaling appraisal epithets in the Self-category are more probably translated through the non-equivalent translation strategies. 6. As far as the variations of stance are concerned, the Self-items tend to be downgraded while the Other-items are more likely to be upgraded through the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. We argue that the translation shifts and the variations of stance from the STs to the TTs can be at least partially attributed to the language differences between Chinese and English, the constraints of the General Strategy of Politeness, and the self-serving principle of ideology. As for linguistic account, the differences between Chinese and English with respect to the uses of lexical items and the collocational patterns have been discussed. From the perspective of the General Strategy of Politeness, we argue that the maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness constrain the translators from up-scaling China and down-scaling other countries in order to make China a more polite personified figure as the maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness require to give high value to Other and low value to Self. A revised version of the Ideological Square Model, which covers a superficial layer and a deeper layer of the Ideological Square, is proposed to offer an ideological account for the opposite ideological pattern, i.e., positive other-presentation and negative self-presentation, revealed in this study. We also provide further analysis in this chapter specifically in line with the research questions formulated and articulated in Chapter 1.

References Brown, Penelope. 2001. “Politeness and language.” In International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, 11620–11624. Oxford: Elsevier Sciences. Campbell, Ian. 2007. “Chi-squared and Fisher-Irwin tests of two-by-two tables with small sample recommendations.” Statistics in Medicine 26 (19): 3661–3675. Cheng, Zhen Qiu [程镇球]. 2003. “Political awareness in the translation of political articles [政治 文章的翻译要讲政治].” Chinese Translators Journal [中国翻译] (03): 20–24. Corder, Gregory W., and Dale I. Foreman. 2014. Nonparametric statistics: A step-by-step approach. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Deng, Xiao Ping [邓小平]. 2008/1993. Selected works of Deng Xiaoping (Vol. 3) [邓小平文选 ( 第三卷)]. Beijing [北京]: People’s Publishing House [人民出版社]. Gu, Yueguo. 1990. “Politeness phenomena in modern Chinese.” Journal of Pragmatics 14 (2): 237–257. Hu, Kai Bao [胡开宝], Tao Li [李涛], and Ling Zi Meng [孟令子]. 2018. Introduction of Corpusbased critical translation studies [语料库批评翻译学概论]. Beijing [北京]: Higher Education Press [高等教育出版社].

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Kádár, Dániel Z., and Michael Haugh. 2013. Understanding politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leech, Geoffrey Neil. 1983. Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman. Leech, Geoffrey Neil. 2014. The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liu, Hui Dan [刘慧丹], and Kai Bao Hu [胡开宝]. 2014. “A corpus-based study of strengthening/Weakening in English-Chinese translations——Focus on translation of English adverbs of degree in Shakespeare’s Plays [基于语料库的莎士比亚戏剧汉译中强化/弱化实证研究—— 以程度副词为例].” Foreign Language Education [外语教学] (02): 94–98. Martin, James Robert, and Peter White. 2005. The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Munday, Jeremy. 2012. “New directions in discourse analysis for translation: A study of decisionmaking in crowdsourced subtitles of Obama’s 2012 State of the Union speech.”. Munday, Jeremy. 2015. “Engagement and graduation resources as markers of translator/interpreter positioning.” Target 27 (3): 406–421. Pan, Wen Guo [潘文国]. 1997. An outline of Chinese-English contrastive studies [汉英语对比纲 要]. Beijing [北京]: Beijing Language and Culture University Press[北京语言大学出版社]. Pan, Li. 2015. “Ideological positioning in news translation: A case study of evaluative resources in reports on China.” Target 27 (2): 215–237. van Dijk, Teun A. 1995. “Discourse semantics and ideology.” Discourse & Society 6 (2): 243–289. van Dijk, Teun A. 1998. Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage. van Dijk, Teun A. 2006. “Discourse and manipulation.” Discourse & Society 17 (3): 359–383. Wang, Ping Xing [王平兴]. 2011. “Rethinking of ‘redundant shifts’ in Chinese-English translation [关于汉英翻译“迁移性冗余”的一些思考].” Chinese Translators Journal [中国翻译] (5): 79– 83. Watts, Richard J. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zhang, Yi Sheng [张谊生]. 2010. Analysis of modern Chinese adverbs [现代汉语副词分析]. Shanghai [上海]: Shanghai Sumerian Press [上海三联書店].

Chapter 6

Conclusion

Drawing on a combined framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model and using a corpus-based approach, we have investigated the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets found in the Chinese-English translation of political discourse from the year of 2000. The Chinese-English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories in political discourse has been examined, which reveals variations in stances towards China and other countries in the process of translation. Specifically, investigation has been carried out to identify the similarities and differences between the general patterns of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories, those of the positive appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories, and those of the negative appraisal epithets, with particular attention to each sub-category of Appraisal System, viz. Engagement, Attitude, and Graduation. Based on the translation data, we have also investigated whether the stances towards Self, i.e., China, and Others, i.e., other countries, have been reshaped and shifted through the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Chinese political discourse. In this concluding chapter, we summarise and assess the main findings in terms of their contributions to the fields of CTS and CDA. We also discuss the limitations of this study and provide potential avenues for future research.

6.1 Revisiting Translation Patterns and Variations of Stance We first discuss the major findings with respect to the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse at both lexico-grammatical and discourse semantic levels. At the lexico-grammatical level, the main concern is the shifts in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories. At the discourse semantic level, the focus is the variations of stance © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Li and K. Hu, Reappraising Self and Others, Corpora and Intercultural Studies 6, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9488-5_6

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towards Self and Other through the English translation of the appraisal epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories. The major findings are summarised as follows. Firstly, it is found that translation shifts do exist in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse and the patterns of those shifts vary with respect to the comparisons with different parameters between the Self-category and the Other-category within Appraisal System. Although most of the appraisal epithets in both the Self- and the Other-categories are translated with the equivalent translation strategy, the equivalent translation strategy is more probably applied to the appraisal epithets in the Self-category while more translation shifts tend to occur in the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Other-category. This indicates that although the translators are faithful, as expected, to the STs when translating the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse, they do produce translation shifts, which is in line with the findings of Li (2013), particularly with respect to the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Other-category. Specifically, the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse vary with the parameter of the polarity of the appraisal epithets and the parameter of the sub-category of Appraisal System. As for the polarity of the appraisal epithets, no significant difference has been found between the Self-category and the Other-category in terms of the English translation of the positive appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse while a strikingly larger proportion of the negative epithets in the Other-category are translated with the non-equivalent translation strategies, compared with those negative epithets in the Self-category. Also, no significant difference has been found between the English translations of the positive epithets and the negative epithets in the Self-category, while a notable difference exits between the English translations of the positive epithets and the negative epithets in the Other-category with the non-equivalent translation strategies more frequently applied to the negative epithets. The translation patterns of the appraisal epithets between the Self-category and the Other-category also vary within in the sub-categories of Appraisal System. As for the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Attitude system, no difference between the Self-category and the Other-category is found. However, statistical analysis has shown that the positive Attitude epithets in the Self-category tend to be omitted in the TTs, among which are the positive appreciation epithets. The translation shifts in the system of Attitude show a pattern that Self is more negatively presented in the TTs, particularly the things of Self rather than its behaviours. With respect to the English translation of the Engagement epithets, it is found that the Engagement epithets in Self are more likely translated through the equivalent translation strategy while the non-equivalent translation strategies are more likely applied to the Engagement epithets in the Other-category, particularly the negative contractive epithets. This is clear evidence of the argument that most of the translators of Chinese political discourse are faithful to the STs when translating the appraisal epithets, which suggests the unbalanced power relations among the translation participants in the translation settings of Chinese political discourse, where the translators are in most cases subordinate to the writers of the STs. It is also argued, however, that in such unbalanced power relationships, the translators have more grounds and

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confidence to positively present China and negatively present part of the Other-items, which implies their efforts for the alignment with other participants and for the aim of rapport among them. In terms of the Graduation system, a significant difference is found between the English translations of the appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories. In general, translation shifts slightly more often occur to the English translation of the Graduation epithets in the Other-category than in the Selfcategory while the positive down-scaling Graduation epithets in the Self-category rather than the Other-category are more likely translated with the non-equivalent translation strategies. Since Graduation epithets are more related to the behaviours, the governing self-serving principle of ideology imposes more constraints on the translators to push them to up-scale the Graduation epithets in the Self-category in the TTs. It is argued that generally, the translators of Chinese political discourse place themselves in line with the Chinese government since they are the employers of the Chinese government and at the same time they limit themselves as mere language providers, strictly abiding by the cardinal principle when translating Chinese political discourse, i.e., being faithful to the STs. It is also argued that the governing self-serving principle of ideology and the General Strategy of Politeness impose normative constraints on the translators as social members in the particular social setting of translation. This explains the different decisions that the translators made for the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories: being more faithful to the appraisal epithets in the Self-category and producing more translation shifts for the appraisal epithets in the Other-category. The second finding is that stance towards China and other countries that the translators of Chinese political discourse reshaped through mediating the STs and the TTs deviates from the original one in the STs, making China less positively presented while other counties less negatively presented in the TTs. It is argued that such mediation and stance variations are governed by the General Strategy of Politeness and the self-serving principle of ideology. The self-serving principle is the ultimate governing rule for the translators of Chinese political discourse to vary the stance towards China and other countries, though the maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness also impose constraints on their translation at the lexical–grammatical level. This means that the variations of stance in the TTs that the translators of Chinese political discourse reshaped would by no means harm the interests of China and operate in accordance with the self-serving principle. It is also argued that a friction exists between the translators as individual members and the translators as a group, which means that not all translators abide by the cardinal principle of being faithful to the STs when translating Chinese political discourse. This study also finds it necessary to distinguish two layers of the Ideological Square, i.e., the superficial layer of Ideological Square and the deeper layer of Ideological Square, with two governing principles, i.e., the General Strategy of Politeness and the self-serving principle, constraining their operations respectively. Because the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse conflict with the original model of Ideological Square, the revised version of a two-layered Ideological Square Model is proposed which offers more explanatory strength. It is

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argued that the two layers of the Ideological Square suggested in the revised model should be distinguished, with the General Strategy of Politeness constraining the superficial layer of the Ideological Square, which allows a discursive pattern of positive other-presentation and negative self-presentation, yet with an ultimate goal of serving Self’s interests, within the deeper layer of the Ideological Square governed by the self-serving principle, which operates in line with positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation.

6.2 Contributions and Implications As the first attempt carried out in the field of Translation Studies to incorporate a corpus-based approach in the combined framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model to investigate the English translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse and the variations of stance in the translation process, this project proves itself to be particularly valuable to, and adds to the growing body of research on, CTS and Discourse Analysis. First and foremost, this study proposes a revised two-layered Ideological Square Model of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation and highlights its potential feasibility, based on the empirical data of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse. As van Dijk (2006) notes, one finds the Ideological Square Model of discursive group polarisation in all ideological discourse. However, this usual ideological pattern is not fully applicable to the English translation of the appraisal epithets in the Chinese context, an ideologydriven discursive practice, because (i) the language differences between Chinese and English allow the translators, here also the writers of the TTs in English, to use different linguistic devices from Chinese to express similar attitudes, emotions, and stance in the STs towards China, the Self-items, and other countries, the Otheritems to align with the potential readers and establish solidarity with them, and (ii) the Chinese culture, in which the English translation of the appraisal epithets is conducted, requires more normative principles of social behaviours, for example, the maxims of the General Strategy of Politeness, for its members, including those translators of Chinese political discourse. It is a matter of fact that translation, as an intercultural social practice, is in no way immune to the ideological shifts in a certain cultural setting. On the basis of the empirical translation data, the General Strategy of Politeness is introduced as one of the governing principles for the operation of the Ideological Square Model to explain the translation patterns identified in the analysis of the English translation of Chinese political discourse. Such a revised model makes noteworthy contributions in that it not only offers a more flexible and explanatory framework for the Chinese-English translation studies, but also moves forward one more step to promote the academic status of Translation Studies as a theory-exporting discipline rather than a discipline that always borrows theoretical models from other academic areas.

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Secondly, this project is a pioneering study that applies a combined framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model into the translation studies of Chinese political discourse. It contributes to the field of a corpus-based CDA approach to Translation Studies, a still underexploited area, by bridging a corpusbased approach and a combined framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model within a broader field of CDA, specifically, to investigate the patterns of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse and identify the variations of stance towards Self and Others in the process of translation. Whereas very few studies have applied Appraisal System, an analytical framework of the writer’s attitude, stance to achieve solidarity with the readers, in Translation Studies, this book draws on a combined framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model to carry out an empirical analysis of the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse and the variations of stance in the process of translation. Whereas very few studies have combined a corpus-based approach with the analysis of translated texts at the semantic level in traditional CTS, this study steps out to base the corpus-based empirical analysis of the translated texts within the semantic framework of Appraisal System and the empirical analysis is based on a Chinese-English parallel corpus of political discourse rather than one or several pieces of articles. Martin and White (2005: 260) also acknowledges that corpus-based approach will play a crucial role in the development of the instantiation cline of appraisal meaning. In addition, a shared point between Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model has been identified and applied to the translation studies of Chinese political discourse, i.e., both Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model are analytical frameworks for discourse analysis and aim to reveal the power relations among the participants of social practice by analysing discourse patterns, which has not been discussed in the previous studies. Thirdly, as a corpus-based study of the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse, this study also has some practical implications. One of the implications is that it helps enlarge the database of the ChineseEnglish corresponding linguistic pairs of Chinese political discourse, which provides conducive references for future studies on Chinese-English bilingual news transediting, building of term database for machine translation, translation testing, and assessment of translation quality. Displaying the ways in which the appraisal epithets are translated in the Chinese-English translation of political discourse, with a large number of concordance lines as the examples of professional translation, this study is conducive to translation teaching and translator training. This study is also of practical significance because it presents the English translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse and reveals the ideological factors that influence the decision-making of the translators in the translation process, thus enhancing our understanding of the different ways to represent appraisal meanings across different cultures. In this way, this study is helpful to the promotion of China’s image and the circulation of China’s policies worldwide.

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6.3 Directions for Future Studies: Problems and Prospects Given the limited accessibility to some political materials and the lack of chances to meet the translators of Chinese political discourse, there are, inevitably, some limitations and shortcomings that must be acknowledged. Firstly, this study would have provided a fuller description of the English translation of the appraisal epithets in political discourse if it had taken into account the contrastive studies between different translation modes, i.e., translation and interpretation of political discourse, and between different text types within a broader category of political discourse, for example, between political speeches and political documents. On the one hand, the characteristics of the translation patterns of written Chinese political texts and the stance variations in the translation process will be highly profiled if compared with those of the transcripts of the interpretation of Chinese political discourse. Since differences between the translation and the interpretation of the appraisal resources in Chinese political discourse have been identified (Li & Hu 2015), a contrastive study of this kind within the analytical framework that this study draws on would offer a valuable insight into the patterns and the hidden ideological forces identified in the translation and the interpretation of Chinese political discourse. On the other hand, a contrastive study between the translations of the appraisal epithets in political discourse of different text types, e.g., government reports, white papers, will not only enrich this study and generate some interesting results, but also show the different characteristics of the translation patterns and the variations of stance in the English translation of Chinese political discourse of different text type. Secondly, this study would facilitate deeper understanding of the translation shifts and the variations of stance in the English translation of Chinese political discourse if triangulation is conducted to echo the theoretical account for the results about the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse, particularly when discussing the variations of stance towards China and other countries. For example, an interview with the translators could provide further insights into the reasons and driving forces of the translation shifts identified in this study. Given the accessibility to the translators of Chinese political discourse, it was not carried out in this study. Nevertheless, such triangulation is important in that it produces the first handed materials that could validate or reject the research result from the empirical analysis and offer sound interpretations of the translators’ mediations of the STs and the TTs. Apart from these limitations, our study presented here, however, has the potential to be extended to various research strands. For further analysis of the Chinese-English translation of political discourse, this concluding chapter ends the book by proposing the potential avenues for future study. Firstly, our research can be expanded by looking at other categories. The research objects in our study do not necessarily have to be limited to one category of appraisal resources, appraisal epithets in this study, though this type of appraisal resources are considered the most prototypical ones. Our study does not examine other kinds

6.3 Directions for Future Studies: Problems and Prospects

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of appraisal resources and the findings of our study thus have to be limited to the translation patterns of the appraisal epithets rather than a general pattern for all the appraisal resources in Chinese political discourse. However, the investigation of the translation of all appraisal resources instead of simply appraisal epithets can show a more holistic view on the translation patterns of the appraisal resources in Chinese political discourse and the variations of stance in the process of translation. Also, the corpus-based approach, such as the analysis of the collocates, can be fully in play if all appraisal resources, rather than simply appraisal epithets, are taken into account since the collocates generated are not limited to the appraisal epithets and thus those that are not appraisal epithets have to be manually disregarded. Secondly, the scope of our investigation can be further broadened beyond linguistic description. Our investigation does not have to be limited to the analysis of translation accuracy at the linguistic level in order to identify the hidden ideology. As Baker (2010) argues in her study on the translation policy of a translation institute MEMRI, “translation is a textual activity that is closely scrutinised and generally treated with suspicion, undermining a narrative elaborated in any given source text does not necessarily mean direct intervention in the text itself”. Conveying a closely similar meaning to the STs does not guarantee an objective and non-biased translation, but sometimes on the contrary, tricks the audience of the translation into believing that the translators are reliable and thus a trustworthy source of information. It shall be emphasised that other subtle devices such as the choices of SL and TL in Baker (2010), rather than linguistic techniques, should be taken into account since they could also help produce a positive stance towards Self and a negative stance towards Others. Another future research strand relating to the second suggestion mentioned above involves the analysis of the paratexts and the multimodality perspective to examine the ideological aspect of translation. As van Dijk (1998: 191) points out, “discourse, language use and communication do play a special role in such processes of reproduction, but ideologies are also being expressed and reproduced by social and semiotic practices other than those of text and talk”, which means that ideologies can be expressed through other communication channels such as eye-gazing and face expression. Thus other semiotic messages can also be taken into account as “many forms of non-verbal discrimination also exhibit ideological beliefs” (van Dijk 1998: 191), which opens up the possibility of drawing on multimodal theory to analyse the English translation of Chinese political discourse. Thirdly, the theoretical framework that this study draws on can be extended to the contrastive analysis of the translations of different genres. As is mentioned in Chapter One, this study focuses on the political discourse mainly on the assumption that political discourse is the site where the policies and stance of a state are expressed. However, this framework is also applicable to other genres. Different patterns may be found in the translation of other genres, such as news and film transcripts, since, as Biber (1991: 170) acknowledges, the linguistic characteristics of different genres are all different. For example, the translation of the appraisal resources in the Selfcategory can be examined and compared between news and political discourse. The investigation of the translation of the appraisal epithets in texts of different genres

188

6 Conclusion

thus would shed new lights on the translation studies within the framework of this project. Fourthly, a diachronic approach can be introduced to the studies on the translation of the appraisal epithets in the Self- and the Other-categories in Chinese political discourse. The diachronic approach helps demonstrate the evolution of the translational norms over time in terms of the translation of the appraisal epithets in Chinese political discourse, allowing detailed analysis of the historical aspects of ideology on Translation Studies. At the same time, it would also reveal the changes of stance towards Self and Others through the translation of the appraisal epithets in different times, which probably produces different shifts in the discourse and social practice of translation. It may present interesting patterns that reveal ideological influence on translation if the contrastive analysis of the translated texts in different times is conducted with respect to the translation of the appraisal resources in Chinese political discourse, since China has undergone great changes. Some critical points in the Chinese history can be used as the cut-off line for the diachronic analysis of the translation of the appraisal resources in Chinese political discourse. Last but not least, other new combined theoretical framework for the translation of the appraisal resources in Chinese political discourse can be developed such as Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar within a broader cognitive linguistics. As an interdisciplinary field, Translation Studies can enrich itself by incorporating the concepts and theoretical models from other academic fields. This study has contributed to CTS by introducing the concepts from other fields such as Corpus Linguistics, Appraisal System and CDA in its investigation of the translation of the appraisal resources in Chinese political discourse. However, other concepts and notions can also be borrowed and applied to similar types of research. For example, the concept of Local Grammar in Corpus Linguistics, which has been heatedly discussed and attracted much attention, may be adopted to investigate the translation of the appraisal resources and to examine its feasibility from the perspective of Translation Studies. This will not only broaden Translation Studies, but also help improve other academic areas because translation data could offer evidence for the revision of the theoretical models borrowed from those academic fields. Despite the shortcomings of our study, as acknowledged above, the application of a combined framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model within a broader field of CDA and an adoption of a corpus-based approach to Translation Studies is not only conducive to various sub-fields of Translation Studies such as translation teaching, translation assessment, and machine translation, but also of great theoretical significance in that the research results, such as the variations of stance in translation and our revised two-layered Ideological Square Model, shed new light on Appraisal System and CDA from a cross-cultural and translation perspective.

References

189

References Baker, Mona. 2010. Narratives of terrorism and security: ‘Accurate’ translations, suspicious frames. Critical studies on terrorism 3 (3): 347–364. Biber, Douglas. 1991. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Li, Jing Jing. 2013. “Translating Chinese political discourse: A functional-cognitive approach to English translations of Chinese political speeches.” PhD thesis, The University of Salford. Li, Tao [李涛], and Kai Bao Hu [胡开宝]. 2015. “Interpreting and translating graduation resources in Chinese political discourse [政治语篇口笔译中的级差资源重构].” Modern Foreign Languages [现代外语] (05): 615–623. Martin, James Robert, and Peter White. 2005. The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. van Dijk, Teun A. 1998. Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage. van Dijk, Teun A. 2006. Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & Society 17 (3): 359–383.

Appendices

Appendix I: Searching Items in the Self-Category and the Other-Category The Self-items 中国

中华人民共和国

我国

我方

中方

祖国

The Other-items 智利

乍得

赞比亚

越南

约旦

英国

印尼

印度尼西亚

印度

意大利

以色列

伊朗

伊拉克

也门

亚美尼亚

叙利亚

匈牙利

新西兰

新加坡

希腊

西班牙

乌兹别克斯坦

乌拉圭

乌克兰

乌干达

文莱

委内瑞拉

瓦努阿图

土库曼斯坦

土耳其

突尼斯

坦桑尼亚

泰国

塔吉克斯坦

索马里

所罗门群岛

苏联

苏丹

斯洛文尼亚

斯洛伐克

斯里兰卡

塞舌尔

塞浦路斯

塞内加尔

塞拉利昂

瑞士

瑞典

日本

葡萄牙

挪威

尼日利亚

尼加拉瓜

尼泊尔

瑙鲁

南非

纳米比亚

墨西哥

莫桑比克

摩洛哥

摩尔多瓦

缅甸

秘鲁

孟加拉国

蒙古

美国

毛里塔尼亚

毛里求斯

马里

马来西亚

马达加斯加

罗马尼亚

卢旺达

卢森堡

利比亚

利比里亚

立陶宛

黎巴嫩

老挝

莱索托

拉各斯

库克群岛

肯尼亚

科威特

科特迪瓦

科索沃

卡塔尔

喀麦隆

津巴布韦

捷克

柬埔寨

加西亚

加蓬

加纳

加拿大

几内亚

几内亚比绍

吉尔吉斯斯坦

吉布提

黑山

荷兰

韩国

海地 (continued)

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. Li and K. Hu, Reappraising Self and Others, Corpora and Intercultural Studies 6, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9488-5

191

192

Appendices

(continued) 哈萨克斯坦

圭亚那

古巴

格鲁吉亚

哥斯达黎加

哥伦比亚

刚果

冈比亚

菲律宾

法国

厄立特里亚

俄罗斯

厄瓜多尔

多米尼加

德国

丹麦

赤道几内亚

朝鲜

布隆迪

布基纳法索

不丹

博茨瓦纳

玻利维亚

波兰

波黑

冰岛

比利时

保加利亚

白俄罗斯

巴新

巴西

巴斯

巴拿马

巴勒斯坦

巴拉圭

巴基斯坦

巴布亚新几内 亚

巴巴多斯

澳大利亚

奥地利

安哥拉

爱沙尼亚

爱尔兰

埃塞俄比亚

埃及

阿塞拜疆

阿联酋

阿拉伯联合酋 长国

阿根廷

阿富汗

阿尔及利亚

阿布哈兹

阿布扎比

美方

俄方

日方

英方

Appendix II: Appraisal Epithets in the Self-Category and the Other-Category Appraisal Epithets in the Self-category 一再

一向

一直

一定

一流 大规模

一贯

一律

一致

一般

十分

几乎

大

大力

大大

大中型

大步

大型

大幅

大幅度

久

凡是

及时

广泛

广阔

义务

也

丰硕

丰富

开放型

无私

无法

无限

无偿

扎扎实实

不

不足

不利

不便

不断

不曾

不懈

历次

友好

尤其

巨大

比较

互相

切实

少

少有

日益

长远

长足

长期

仍

仍然

仅

反动

反复

从不

从未

从来

从容

公开

公正

公平

文明

认真

未

未经

正当

正常

正确

平安

平等

平稳

平衡

旧

乐

主动

主要

半封建

必

必要

必须

必将

必然

永远

民主

辽阔

共同

权威

再

再次

协调

有力

有机

有利

有序

有限

有效

成功

成套

成熟

光明

光荣

光辉

当然

曲折

同声

先进

伟大

优异

优秀

优良

优质

自由

自信

自觉

全面

全新

合法

合理

多

庄严

齐全

充分

充足

充裕

关切

关键

迅速

迅猛

尽力

好

约

进一步

进步

远大

均

均衡

却

严正 (continued)

Appendices

193

(continued) 严厉

严肃

严重

严格

严峻

严密

极

极大

极为

极其

极端

更

更为

更加

连年

坚决

坚定

坚实

坚强

困难

低

近

彻底

妥善

系统

灿烂

没有

快

快速

完全

完备

完善

完整

宏伟

牢牢

牢固

良好

良性

初步

陆续

努力

纷繁

规范

幸福

奋力

奋勇

非常

尚未

果断

明显

明确

固有

忠实

知名

和平

和谐

依法

依然

迫切

所有

贫困

贫穷

贫弱

盲目

刻意

郑重

宝贵

审慎

建设性

始终

艰巨

艰辛

艰苦

封建

按时

甚至

相互

相对

相当

相称

显著

适当

适度

科学

重

重大

重要

重点

重重

重新

复杂

顺利

很

急剧

将

美好

美丽

首要

洁净

活跃

突出

客观

神圣

勇敢

绝不

绝对

统一

顽强

都

热切

恐怖

真正

真诚

根本

逐步

逐渐

较

较为

紧张

紧迫

紧急

紧紧

紧密

圆满

特大

特别

积极

透明

健康

爱国

脆弱

高

高产

高级

高度

高速

高高

高效

准确

宽广

被迫

基本

崇高

偏

清洁

清楚

清醒

深入

深远

深刻

深厚

密切

隆重

绿

越来越

落后

硬

确实

雄健

悲惨

辉煌

最

最为

最高

最新

黑暗

集中

阔步

普遍

富裕

富强

屡

强大

强烈

蓬勃

错误

廉洁

新

新型

慎重

稳

稳步

鲜明

腐朽

精干

精心

薄

整个

繁多

繁荣

Appraisal Epithets in the Other-category 一再

一向

一并

一直

一致

十分

几乎

又

大

大力

大规模

大范围

大型

大幅

广泛

也

无法

无端

不

不过

不安

不时

不断

友好

尤其

巨额

切实

少

长期

片面

仍

仍然

仅

仅仅

反复

从不

公开

公正

未

未经

正当

平等

平稳

主要

必须

必将

必然

动荡

共同

再

再次

再度

协调

有效

死

成功

至少

尖锐

早已

曲折

先进

优质

自由

全力

全面

合法

多

多边

充分

迅速

尽量

约

进一步

均

却

严厉

严重

严峻

极

极力

极右

更

更加

还

坚决

坚实

低

近 (continued)

194

Appendices

(continued) 妥善

没有

快

快速

完全

牢固

良好

罕见

努力

纯粹

纷纷

非法

明显

明确

和平

依然

所有

贫困

贫瘠

庞大

刻意

郑重

单方面

实际上

孤立

始终

持久

故意

相互

显然

重

重大

重要

重点

重新

顺利

很

很快

独特

急剧 真正

将

首要

活跃

突然

统一

都

恐怖

真实

逐步

逐渐

较

紧

紧张

紧急

紧密

圆满

特大

特别

积极

秘密

透明

健康

高产

高级

高度

高档

悍然

容易

被迫

难

难以

基本

著名

略

猖獗

毫不

竟然

清洁

清楚

深刻

密切

密集

越来越

趁机

最

最新

普遍

强劲

强烈

缓

缓慢

频繁

暗中

错误

新

稳

稳定

竭力

擅自

整个

激烈