A Study On Interpreting Strategies Of Chinese Diplomatic Discourse From The Perspective Of The Appraisal Theory

The introduction to the foreign policy of major country at the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China made topics such as diplomatic discourse,major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics,and the construction of China’s national image into hot words in academic research.Interpreting researches have always combined cutting-edge theories and achievements in the development of various disciplines.The Appraisal Theory is the research result of systematic functional linguistics,which is of great significance to the study of interpreting.Exploring how interpreters deal with various appraisal resources in diplomatic discourse and finding out the reasons for the equivalence and inequality of these appraisal meanings in interpreting are important topics that needs to be solved urgently in the Appraisal Theory and interpreting researches.It can also provide a theoretical and empirical basis for the connotative relationship between interpreting and the construction of the national image of major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics to a certain extent.Under the guidance of the Appraisal Theory,this study conducts discourse analysis and research on the interpreting version of Chinese diplomatic discourse during COVID-19 pandemic in the first half of 2020.The study adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative research.First,the overall distribution of various appraisal resources is collected.The corpus analysis software WordSmith Tool 4.0 collects for the interpreting version of 104 regular press conferences of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the first half of 2020 and performs quantitative data analysis of word frequency and wordlist.Then the author combines the three types of resources of the Appraisal Theory for in-depth and detailed qualitative analysis.This study found three characteristics of China’s diplomatic discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic.First of all,in the attitude resources of diplomatic discourse,positive emotional resources are used more than negative ones,which is conducive to building a positive image of a major country that is proactive and confident during the international community’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.Secondly,a large number of heterogloss resources are used in diplomatic discourse to enhance the persuasiveness of the views of spokespersons of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.At the same time,it can also achieve the purpose of dialogic contraction.Finally,among the graduation resources for expressing emotional intensity,China’s diplomatic discourse flexibly uses force resources and focus resources to strengthen its image as a responsible and peacekeeping major country for her own people and citizens of the world,and always adhere to the international community and organizational conventions to build world peace.When the Appraisal Theory is applied to diplomatic interpreting,interpreters can deal with various appraisal resources and use different interpreting techniques to realize the reconstruction of appraisal meaning in the target language.First of all,when realizing the equivalence interpreting of attitudinal meaning,interpreters can not only find corresponding words and phrases in the target language,but also use grammatical means to reconstruct the attitude meaning in the target language.Secondly,from the perspective of achieving the purpose of dialogic contraction,interpreters adopt a modest word-to-word correspondence method,and do not make excessive language structure adjustments.For reconstructing the engagement meaning in heterogloss resources,more explanations are used to achieve the purpose of communication.Finally,at the level of achieving the equivalence of the graduation meaning in the target language,the completeness of the interpreter’s reconstruction of the enhanced graduation meaning is greater than the the weakened ones.The study also found that the interpreters’ interpreting strategies and methods plays an important role in the formation of China’s responsible and peacekeeping diplomatic image as a major country.