Reconstruction of ‘Attitude’ in Professional and Trainee Translators

This paper applies Appraisal Theory to the study of translation. More specifically, it aims to analyze to what extent professional and trainee translators reconstruct appraisal resources available in the source text into their translations. This is done with particular focus on ‘Attitude’ sub-system of Appraisal Theory. Attitude is one of three main components of the Appraisal System in language, which is concerned with the use of evaluative language. Extracts of the 2013 speech delivered by Iranian president Rouhani at UN General Assembly and its official translation constituted the primary corpus for this study. The secondary corpus was the multiple translations provided by students.The results showed that there are no systematic differences in the way that the selected appraisal aspect (Attitude) is manifested in the professional translation of the speech. There was a parallel distribution of attitudinal expression in source text and the translation by professional translator. Possible reasons are the highly sensitive and important nature of UN General Assembly speeches. The professional translator does not seem to have the permission to make possible changes in the translation. UN translator in our case study preserves as much as possible of the attitudinal values within ST both in terms of type and distribution. On other hand, multiple translations provided by trainee translators revealed the persistence of attitudinal values to a great extent in translation. Although, there were variations as to the lexical expression of Attitude in TTs. These were due to fact that for some words there is not a core literal or dictionary equivalent in English and where there exists an alternative to opt from among common near-synonyms, greater lexical variation is expected to occur

Keywords:

Appraisal theory , translation , attitude , professional translators , trainee translators