Shifts in the English Translation of Appreciation Resources in Political Speeches

LNE

Lecture Notes in Education, Arts, Management and Social Science

3083-10912705-053X

Bio-Byword Scientific Publishing Pty. Ltd.

10.26689/LNE.v4i5.15058

Article

Shifts in the English Translation of Appreciation Resources in Political Speecheshttps://artdesignp.com/journal/LNE/4/5/10.26689/LNE.v4i5.15058LiuChunmei

2026

2026-05-26

With the Appraisal Theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics as the theoretical framework, this paper discusses translation shifts of appreciation resources realized by content words at the register and genre levels, as well as the driving factors underlying such shifts. This study takes as its corpus the English translations of fourteen full speeches by China’s top leader published by Foreign Languages Press in 2014 and primarily employs a qualitative approach. The study shows that meaning shifts may emerge in domestic translators’ renderings of state leaders’ political speeches, as translators seek to achieve interpersonal functional equivalence through linguistic choices. From this perspective, translation can be viewed as the translator’s social practice.Appraisal theory,English translation of political speech,Appreciation resources,Shift

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