Translation of Appraisal Resources in the Introduction of Chinese academic articles by native Chinese speaking translators

Proceedings of The 5th International Conference on Modern Approaches in Humanities and Social sciences

Year: 2022

DOI:

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Translation of Appraisal Resources in the Introduction of Chinese academic articles by native Chinese speaking translators

Meng-Lin Chen

ABSTRACT: 

As a special academic discourse, rich interpersonal meaning and ubiquitous appraisal resources (expressions with evaluative meaning) according to systemic functional linguistics characterize research articles. While academic writing has been a major theme in academia, the predominance of English as the medium in publishing scholarly papers and conducting academic exchanges has led to a great deal of research attention being paid to academic writing in English as a second language (L2)/foreign language as well as the evaluation of interpersonal meaning in academic writing. However, the translation in L2 of academic writing has been largely ignored. Building a parallel translation corpus, this study used Martin & White ‘s (2005) Appraisal System as the analytic framework to analyze the appraisal resources used by L2 translators (native Chinese-speaking) of different levels (professional and non-professional) in their translation from Chinese into English of the Introduction section of research papers. It also investigated how the professional translators differentiated themselves from non-professional translators in their use of translation techniques during the process. This research has identified the characteristics of the two groups in their use of appraisal resources and has found significant differences between them in their use of translation techniques. The results of the study may shed some light on how native Chinese speaking translator deal with appraisal expressions in translation into their L2. It will also bear some pedagogical implications for improving the quality of academic writing in English.

keywords: appraisal resources, academic translation, professional translator, second language, Chinese into English translation.