President Obama’s speech and its Persian translation: The appraisal Theory Approach

Iran, ID LLCE2016-353;    This study attempts to investigate the linguistic signs of a translator’s intervention, subjective evaluation , and to discover those features that, in practice, are  critical for a translator. To add objectivity to the analysis, the main theoretical model adopted is drawn from what is known as appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005). Appraisal theory designed to describe the different components of a speakers attitude, the strength of that attitude and the ways that the speakers aligns him/herself with the sources of attitude and with the receiver . For the purpose of data analysis, we used President Obama’s speech on  Iranian’s New Year celebration and it’s Persian translation by VOA news as a case study. The result showed that translators are mostly concerned with understanding and selecting the correct equivalent for SL terms and used the domestication and manipulation strategy in translation.

Key Words: Translation Studies- Appraisal Theory- Evaluation- Ideology