A Contrastive Study of the English Translations of A New Account of Tales of the World—From the Perspective of Appraisal System

This paper analyzes and compares the realizations and degree of attitudinal meanings in the source texts and two English translations of 100 selected stories from A New Account of Tales of the World by drawing upon the Appraisal system. It is found that affect accounts for the largest proportion in the source texts, and positive, explicit attitude is the major attitudinal meaning. Though the two English translations resemble the source texts in the meaning and degree of attitude, some attitudinal meanings are up-scaled, down-scaled or missing in the translated texts. The differences between source texts and translated texts lie in the translators’ motivation and the linguistic features of the source texts.