Study On English Translation Of Tourist Attractions:A Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

As an important promotion method of tourist attractions,the translation of tourism introductions attracts broad attention of the scholars.A large number of translation researches are conducted from the perspective of System-Functional Linguistics(SFL),but few of those focuses on the appraisal meanings latent in the texts.The faithful realization of appraisal meanings is a key sector in the translation process,which needs further in-depth exploring.However,in the previous studies,the frameworks and analyzing tools are not comprehensive enough to fully depict the domain of appraisal meanings.To fill this gap,Martin further expands the interpersonal function of SFL and proposes the Appraisal System.In the past two decades,this theory is widely employed in the field of discourse analysis,literature review and translation studies.The present study takes the Appraisal Theory raised by Martin and White(2005)as the main framework and the analyzing tool to conduct a corpus based research.With integrity of both quantitative and qualitative researching methods,this study will explore the 20 selected Chinese tourism introductions and their translated versions in terms of appraisal resources distribution and realization of evaluative meanings.Through a comparative analysis on the corpora,the author finds that the distribution of appraisal resources in the translated texts shares high similarity with that in the source texts,but there are still obvious differences in certain type of resources.Regarding the attitudinal resources,the translated texts boast a slightly higher number of negative 'affect' resources;as for the graduation resources,the number of 'force'resources reveals a sharp decrease in the translated texts;in terms of engagement resources,the frequency of 'heterogloss' is much higher in the translated texts.By analyzing the distribution of appraisal resources,a conclusion can be drawn that the translated texts have basically realized the evaluative meanings reflected in the source texts,but there are still some shifts in the rendering process.The author further investigates the appraisal meanings rendering in detailed sentences to analyze both the proper and improper treatments of appraisal meanings.Based on the analysis,the author evaluates the translated texts and makes some suggestions regarding faithful rendering of appraisal meanings and the promotion effect of the translated texts as well.In all,this research reveals the distribution differences of appraisal resources in the source texts and translated texts,and the author further proposes suggestions on how to realize the appraisal meanings.Meanwhile,the study also examines the feasibility and efficiency of applying appraisal theory to tourism texts translation and analysis.The author hopes that this study can make some contribution to the application of Appraisal Theory to tourism translation and analysis,and also open up a new horizon in the tourism texts translation.