Manipulation through the perspective of appraisal theory

The basic understanding of the idea of changes in the TT through translation of the ST, as described above, is developed in the attitude of Munday (2012) who seeks the analogies between translation or interpretation and the appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005).

The theory is embedded within Systemic Functional Linguistic paradigm (e.g. Halliday 1994/2004), which points out the importance of lexicogrammatical choices and analyses their functions, identifying three simultaneous modes of meaning – the textual, ideational and interpersonal (Martin and White 2005:1, 7). As Martin and White state:

Ideational resources are concerned with construing experience: what’s going on, including who’s doing what to whom, where, when, why and how and the logical relation of one going-on to another. Interpersonal resources are concerned with negotiating social relations: how people are interacting, including the feelings they try

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to share. Textual resources are concerned with information flow: the ways in which ideational and interpersonal meanings are distributed in waves of semiosis, including inte5rconnections among waves and between language and attendant modalities (action, image, music etc.). These highly generalized kinds of meaning are referred to as metafunctions. (Martin and White 2005: 7)

Munday, based on Martin and White, refers to various elements of a speaker’s attitude (incorporating affect, judgement/ethics or appreciation as the constituents of evaluation), the strength of that attitude named graduation, and the fact how the speaker aligns himself or herself with the sources of that attitude, or the receiver – namely to his or her engagement (Munday 2012).

According to Munday, evaluation is typical of all the choices we make in communication – of words, syntax, intonation etc. It is subjective in nature and matched with the values of wider social and ideological context. Discourse, in which the speaker or translator are engaged, can be characterized by two factors – ideological, relating to ideas and beliefs (the speaker’s or translator’s perspective), and axiological, incorporating values and negotiating solidarity or community among the participants of the discourse (Munday 2012: 11-12, 16).

Such an attitude, typical of the translator or interpreter, who actively takes part in a communication process, evaluates and is not transparent while rendering ST meanings, but directed by some extratextual factors (commissioner, brief, purpose, audience expectation, TT function, and his or her own sociocultural and educational background, ideological preferences etc.), embodies the so-called interpersonal function of language, mentioned so far, that deals with the relationship between the writer and the reader – in that case – the intervening person being the translator. His or her intervention in the ST is judged based on the evaluation according to the appraisal theory (Munday 2012: 2,9). In the process of translation the translator/interpreter has to refer to the choices of the writer/speaker and elaborate his/her own choices based on the ST, including his/her assumptions, beliefs etc., sometimes making the evaluation invoked (the one that “would cover not only the context-dependent instances […]

but also other, culturally sensitive triggers, the association of which may pass unnoticed by some sectors of the audience” (Munday 2012: 64). The so-called counter-expectancy indicators (Martin and White 2005: 67) also fall among the means of invoking attitude of the translator – e.g. discourse markers like “however”, modal particles – “only”, “surely”, attitudinal adverbials – “indeed”, “really”, “even”, which “ ‘provoke attitude and represent

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points in the text where the writer is adding in a value judgement, either by contradicting what has gone before (e.g. however, on the other hand) or by underlining a value that counters a potential challenge (e.g. only, really).” (Munday 2012: 66).

A similar function of performing interpersonal relations of the translator/interpreter and the writer/speaker in the translation/interpretation process is attributed to the idea of Chilton (2004: 56) called deictic positioning, comprising space, time and modality (moral values), crucial in the analyses and renderings of political discourse. As Munday profoundly states:

[It] conceptualizes the relationship of speaker to hearer as well as various situational features including physical location, point in the speech and development of the discourse. It is closely related to the appraisal resource of engagement […]. Deixis is the most evident form of positioning working in tandem with the other forms of evaluation […]. (Munday 2012: 68)

The author suggests that such opportunities are “the potential for translation to create ideological distortion of a ST discourse” and through them “”the axiological and ideological message of the text may be truncated and manipulated by censorship or recontextualization of various forms.” (Munday 2012: 16-17, 79).

To House (2008: 16) such an intervention on the part of the translator is “a manipulation of the source text beyond what is linguistically necessary”. Munday advocates this view referring to Billiani (2007). According to it:

When a new version of a text is produced for a new cultural context, when a translator or an interpreter intervenes, the basis of evaluation also shifts. In extreme cases, when the cross-linguistic or cross-cultural differences are major, or where the purpose or function of the translation is very different from the ST, this may affect many points in a text. Modification of the ideational, ‘factual’ information in a text, or the story level in narrative, could take us into the realm of adaptation, which may be more frequent and even acceptable for target-oriented versions of fairy tales but it may also occur in contexts of heavy cultural manipulation or political censorship. (Munday 2012: 40)

The author concludes his theoretical assumption stating that:

In parallel, my interest is in the identification of those points and lexical features in a

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text that in translation are most susceptible to value manipulation; those points that most frequently show a shift in translation, and those that generate the most interpretative and evaluative potential; those that may be most revealing of the translator’s values. I term this points ‘value-rich’ and, where there exists the possibility that they will affect the reception of the text, ‘sensitive’ or ‘critical’. (Munday 2012: 41)

Such a treatment will be the clue for our evaluation of the research material in Chapter 4, and an interpretative tip for us, as interpretation directed towards the imposed norms of the censorship and the objective fact of translating within some time distance causing e.g. trouble with deixis will make translators manipulate, with or without their deliberate intention. Such a constraint as translating deictic elements into “TL place, time and social space” naturally results in the fact that: “The translator faces then the task of reestablishing deixis in terms which would be comprehensible to the new readership, i.e. relative to the point of reference rooted in TL language and society” (Berezowski 1997: 40), all that in order to convey the source message in the most equivalent way. Such a way may be easily excused if Evans’

(2004: 750) ”ego-based model” of the time perception will be favoured over the “time-based model” (Łyda 2005: 75-76), but still equivalent rendering of time in translation is a “sensitive”

element, to use Munday’s reference, as it constitutes one of the most common culture specific issues, difficult to overcome when different cultures meet (Arabski and Wojtaszek 2011: 3).

The concept of equivalence as seen through the perspective of manipulation will be the topic of a subsequent section.