Abstract
As explicit expression of attitude is restrained in translations of canonical texts, the peritext often becomes a place for the translator’s attitudinal mediation. Unlike previous studies where the translational peritext is under the name of the translator, this study presents a special case in which the peritext attached to the translation of the Platform Sutra, a religious text, is attributed to the translator’s teacher, whose lectures in the source language served as the basis of the peritextual commentary. By adopting the appraisal framework, the study demonstrates how explicit attitudes, especially judgements, are instilled in the commentary to direct the readers to see the protagonist Huineng as a hero and many other characters as villains. Despite the apparent attribution of the commentary to the translator’s teacher, the translator plays an active role in reorganizing, translating and sometimes modifying the attitudinal expressions from the original lectures. Putting the commentary under the name of the translator’s teacher functions to further enhance the mediating power of the attitude. The specialness of the case study will make it complementary to existing studies on attitude as mediation.
About the authors
Hailing Yu obtained her PhD from the Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, in 2017. She is currently working as Assistant Professor in the School of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Hunan University. Her research interests cover systemic functional linguistics, translation studies of religious texts, and multimodal analysis.
Dr Canzhong Wu is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University. He specializes in translation studies, the development of computational tools for multilingual grammatical reference resources, and systemic functional linguistics.
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