A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Language Of Evaluation—Appraisal In English(Chapter 3)

The report is based on the E-C translation of The Language of Evaluation— Appraisal in English(Chapter 3).Published in 2005,this academic monograph was written by James Robert Martin,a famous systemic functional linguist,and his student Peter Robert Rupert White.The source text is the most difficult text the translator has ever encountered,not only because it defies grammatical parsing,challenges interpretation on the part of the translator,who is a layman to Systemic Functional Linguistics,but also because it lacks consistency when deploying technical terms.The selected text gives a detailed introduction to the engagement system,which is a subsystem of the appraisal theory.Considering that this monograph has no Chinese translation,this translation practice enables Chinese scholars to have a deeper understanding of the appraisal theory,especially its engagement system.The Language of Evaluation—Appraisal in English is a demanding informative text which is quite abstruse and difficult to understand.At the lexical level,nominalization is widely used and there is no consistency in the text’s deployment of technical terms.At the syntactical level,passive sentences and complex sentences are ubiquitous.In order to achieve a better translation of the selected text,the translator applies Catford’s translation shift theory as the theoretical guidance.Based on this theory,this report analyzes and discusses the problems and difficulties encountered in the translation process from level shifts and category shifts,including the translation of plural form of English nouns,English tense and mood under level shifts;the shifts of part of speech and translation of English sentences in the passive voice under category shifts.In addition,with regard to the translation of technical terms and complex sentences in the source text,the translator adopts translation techniques such as addition,omission and annotation to make the translation easier for the target readers to understand.The translator has also employed a section to discuss the translation of dubious terms.Through this translation practice,the translator has gained a better comprehension of the philosophy of the appraisal theory and its engagement subsystem.It is hoped that the translation strategies and techniques summarized in this translation report will provide some reference for future translations of related types of academic texts.