Appraisal System and Translation Studies: Retrospect and Prospect

Compared with the ideational meaning and the textual meaning, the evaluative meaning, a central part of the interpersonal meaning in any text, has posed more significant challenge to translation practice. As an SFL-informed analytical framework established in the new century which deals with attitudinal meanings in discourse, the original system of Appraisal has been extensively used in translation studies, mainly in the arenas of literary translation, news translation and diplomatic translation. This paper reviews the application of the Appraisal System in studies of the translation of different genres, elucidating how the three subsystems — Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation — tend to be employed across various genres and how the shifts in their meanings reflect the influence of constraining factors such as genre conventions, value orientations, and ideological considerations. Future research should extend the Appraisal System to such fields as academic translation, interpreting studies and multimodal translation studies, while borrowing the paradigms and ideas from corpus translatology, critical discourse analysis or cognitive translatology.