Can English Carry the Weight of My Pakistani Experiences? An Appraisal perspective

Author(s) : Naima Batool

Abstract:

The study aims at exploring the differences in the English translation of Urdu short stories selected from “The House of Loneliness” by Zahida Hina in 2017. Munday (2012) argues that in translation, the source text is reworked and rearranged causing change in the evaluative meanings of the text (Alsina, Espunya&Naro, 2017). The paper builds on the appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005) of discourse analysis developed within systemic functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) with a focus on appraisal domains of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. The study finds the answer of the main research questions regarding the distribution of appraisal resources which vary across the source text and its translations and three subsidiary questions. The first one is regarding exploration of evaluative meanings in the source text. The second one focuses on the investigation of the evaluative meanings in the translated text and the third one explores which appraisal resource produces maximum nuances. The data comprises of short story originally written by ZahidaHina named as ‘Kumkum is Fine’. It is translated by Yousuf Shahid namely ‘کم کم بہت آرام سے ہے’. For comparison of both texts (i.e in Urdu and in English), the data was tagged manually. The results of the study have shown that the translated text lacks the evaluated values which the source text (Urdu) has. Also, Graduation (subdomain of Appraisal) went under maximum nuances explored in the study. The present study can be considered pioneer as there isn’t sufficient literature available on the application of the Appraisal framework in Urdu language so, it is significant.
Keywords: Short story, appraisal, translation, nuances, evaluation.