The Transmission Of Attitudes In The C-E Translation Of China Foreign Ministry Spokesperson’s Remarks On China-India Issues

Following Fairclough’s three-dimensional(text,discourse practice,and social practice)discourse analysis framework,and the attitude subsystem(affect,judgement,and appreciation)of appraisal theory,this thesis makes a contrastive analysis of the selection and distribution of attitudes between the Chinese text and English text in an attempt to see whether the attitudes conveyed in the Chinese version of diplomatic discourse is transmitted fully into the English version and what the hidden ideology and rationales behind are.The research questions include: 1)How are attitude resources distributed in the Chinese source text and English target text? 2)How do attitude resources chosen help to express diplomatic attitudes,views,and positions? 3)Whether attitudes expressed in the English version consistent with those of the spokesperson? 4)What are the ideologies and their reasons behind the(in)consistency between the English and Chinese texts?The analytical data is a Chinese-English parallel corpus of diplomatic discourse containing the remarks on China-India Issues,produced from June 2017 to December2020 by spokespersons from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC and available on the official websites.Among the major findings are: 1)the frequency and proportion of judgement resources are the highest in both the Chinese source text and the English target text;the second highest is the appreciation resources;while the affect resources account for the lowest frequency and proportion of attitude system;2)from the polarity of attitude in Chinese diplomatic discourse,the frequency and proportion of attitudes in the English target text are consistent with those in the Chinese source text;the proportion of positive attitude is much higher than that of negative attitude,and the positive attitude is dominant;3)the English and Chinese texts mainly help to convey the Chinese government’s diplomatic attitude and position on China-India issues through the selection of adjectives,adverbs,verbs and phrases involving affect,judgement,and appreciation;4)the attitudes convey in the English target text are generally consistent with that of the Chinese source text.Although the diplomatic attitudes,viewpoints,and positions conveyed by the English target text are generally consistent with those in the Chinese source text,there are still some differences in expressing attitudes between the English target and Chinese source texts;5)the consistency of attitude expression between the English and Chinese texts implies their alignment with the national stance of the ideology of the Chinese government;While the inconsistency of attitude expression between the English and Chinese texts can be attributed to the influence of power relations,social identity,and cultural values in social practice.