Contrastive Research on Attitudinal Resources in English Translation of Li Bai’s Poems Based on Appraisal Theory

In order to promote the translation of Chinese poetry, this paper studies the differences of attitudinal resources between Li Bai’s eight poems and the English translation poems of both Xu Yuanchong and Lowell based on Appraisal Theory, and it finds out that the quality of the translation poems can be improved by adjusting appraisal strategies.


Quantitative Statistics of Attitudinal Resources in Li Bai's Original Poems and Two English Translation Poems
Systemic Functional Linguistics believes that translation equivalence should not only seek textual equivalence, but also pay attention to the equivalence of the two languages' discourse in expressing the attitude, motivation, judgment, role and other interpersonal meanings of the speaker (Hu, 1989). As the standard of translation, Appraisal system focuses on whether the attitudes, emotions and values of the original author are reproduced in the translation (Qiu, 2011); thereby the target language readers can get roughly the same information with the source language readers, which is also an important criterion to evaluate the quality of the translation.
In translation practice, it is difficult for translators to grasp the overall attitude of the source text and reproduce the attitude of the source text in the target text. In virtue of Appraisal Theory, we can analyze the whole and partial attitude of the source text by annotation, and the translation quality can also be evaluated by analyzing different distribution of attitudinal resources between the source text and the target text. This paper randomly selected eight Li Bai's poems and its corresponding English translations by Xu Yuanchong and Lowell (see Table 1), then the eight original poems and the translated poems were annotated with attitudinal resources (including Affect resources, Judgment resources and Appreciation resources). In addition, the distribution of Affect, Judgment and Appreciation resources and their sub-types are calculated, so as to make a contrastive analysis of the characteristics of appraisal strategies between the two English versions. www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/sll Studies in Linguistics and Literature Vol. 2, No. 3, 2018 143 Published by SCHOLINK INC.

English Translations
In the last section, the paper will make a quantitative study on the attitudinal resource frequency of Li Bai's poems and its two English translations. In this section, Affect resources, Judgment resources and Appreciation resources of the original poems and the two translated poems will be analyzed, so as to ascertain the different translation appraisal strategies of the two translators and to what degree that the translated poems are faithful to the original poems.
The combination of Appraisal Theory and translation help us to investigate how translators can combine the choice of language resources with the appraisal significance of attitudinal resources, and to build an interaction between the translators and the target readers, so as to realize interpersonal meaning (Chen & Wen, 2013). Table 2   Wang's behavior. It can be seen from the above example, in order to retain the linguistic form of the original poem, to accurately restore the meaning of the original poem, and to meet the reading expectation of the target language readers, the two translators adopt the appraisal strategy of adding some attitudinal resources.
2) The Appreciation resources of the original poems and the two translated poems account for the largest proportion in the whole Attitude system.
Poetry generally focuses on chanting things, and it is a convenient way for poets to express their feelings and aspirations through the description of landscape. Therefore, landscape description is very common in poetry, and it explains why the Appreciation resources account for the largest proportion in 3) The increase attitudinal resources of Xu's translated poems are mainly the Affect and Appreciation resources.
Affect resources as process, quality and comment in the original poems are evenly distributed, but in Xu's translated poems, Affect resources as process accounts for a large proportion. Drinking song is a typical kind of poetry before Tang dynasty, which mostly involves reciting poetry and drinking. As in www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/sll Studies in Linguistics and Literature Vol. 2, No. 3, 2018 147 Published by SCHOLINK INC.
corpus 6, "岑夫子, 丹丘生, 将进酒, 杯莫停", although there is no attitudinal resource, the high spirits of drunkenness is revealed in the lines, the rhythm of the poem is expressed by these short sentences. Xu's translation is "Dear friends of mine, cheer up (AF: +process), cheer up (AF: +process)! I invite you to wine", Xu transforms the implicit Affect attitude of the original poem into the explicit Affect attitude by adding Affect resources as process. The appraisal strategies for increasing Affect resources employed by Xu Yuanchong is accord with his translation strategy, namely, the pursuit of "three beauty" (beauty in sound, beauty in meaning and beauty in form). Xu insists that in pursuit of "three beauty", the translator may conduct "creative translation" or "free translation" appropriately.
In corpus 2, "烟花 (AP: +reaction) 三月下扬州", Yang Zhou is famous for its beautiful scenery, especially in March, flowers and trees flourished as beautiful as a misty wonderland, so "烟花" is used to describe the misty beautiful scenery of Yang Zhou, the word more or less revealed Li Bai's admiration for his friend's trip.
Xu's translation is "For River Town green with willows (AP: +reaction) and red with flowers (AP: +reaction)", by adding Appreciation resources, the translator presents the beautiful scenery of Jiang Nan to the readers, so as to help the target language readers to understand the artistic conception of "烟 花". In corpus 6, "古来圣贤 (JU: +capacity) 皆寂寞 (JU: -capacity), 惟有饮者留其名 (JU: +normality)", "圣贤" refers to a man with great virtue. Lowell's translation is "The sages (JU: +capacity) and worthies(JU: + capacity) of old times have left not a sound(JU: -capacity). Only those who drank have achieved lasting fame (JU: +capacity)". The translator adds a Judgment resource "worthies" to make the meaning of "sages" more clearer, which is conform to her translation strategy of trying to reproduce the deep meaning of the original text.

Conclusion
Based on Appraisal Theory, this paper conducts a quantitative contrastive The Appraisal Theory helps the translator grasp the attitude of the original author; the translator can adjust the translation to keep the consistency of Appraisal resources of the translation and the original text in all aspects by adopting appropriate translation strategy, so as to improve the quality of the translation, and to help Chinese classic poetry "going global".