As a major discourse semantic system construing interpersonal meaning, Appraisal plays a vital role in negotiating power relations, constructing alignment and achieving solidarity between speakers/writers and listeners/readers (Martin and White 2005: 34). In translation studies, the theoretical framework of Appraisal also helps to unveil the values inserted into the text by translators, providing an analytical tool to identify translators’ intervention in translation shifts. A major difficulty in conducting large-scale corpus-based studies on the translation of Appraisal resources lies in the complex manual coding schemes and procedures. In this regard, Reappraising Self and Others: A Corpus-Based Study of Chinese Political Discourse in English Translation, authored by Tao Li and Kaibao Hu, provides a useful exploration in overcoming this difficulty.

The book, based on corpus methodology, employs a framework combining Appraisal Theory and the Ideological Square Model (van Dijk 1998: 267) to investigate, firstly, how Appraisal epithets are translated in the English version of Chinese political discourse and, secondly, how the translation reveals translators’ stance and value towards China (Self) and other countries (Others). As one of the first monographs dealing with Appraisal in the translation of political discourse in the Chinese context, the work provides a feasible framework for corpus-based critical translation studies (Laviosa 2004), proposing a revised model of Ideological Square. The corpora built for this study contribute in various ways to representing Appraisal meaning across different cultures (p. vii), broadening the research scope for Appraisal studies. In addition, translation trainers may find the corpora valuable given that a large number of bilingual concordances containing Appraisal resources can be used by trainees for reference.

The whole book is organised logically into six chapters. Chapter 1 starts with an introduction to evaluation in translation and explains why political translation matters in the Chinese context. The research objects are carefully defined by the authors as Appraisal epithets, that is, “any adjective or adverb which indicates the speaker’s or writer’s attitudinal view on the property of feelings, behaviors, or things, either positive or negative, the source or the gradability of these attitudinal views” (p. 4). To make a large-scale corpus-based study possible, this definition restricts the scope of research to a viable scale by avoiding vague semantic concepts which may pose difficulty in identifying Appraisal resources. Then, the combined framework of Appraisal Theory and the Ideological Square Model is introduced as a new approach to uncover the intervention and ideology behind translation. The aim, research questions and structure of the book are presented, in order, at the end of this chapter.

Chapter 2 reviews the major literature on the translation of political discourse, especially corpus-based studies in the Chinese context. This chapter is divided into three parts which are closely related to the subject of this monograph. The first part mainly deals with Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS) in the Chinese context, covering seven themes of studies, including translation-oriented corpus compilation and processing, translation universals, linguistic patterns in the Chinese-English language pair, translational norms, translator’s style, interpreting studies and critical translation studies (p. 15). The second part examines studies on political discourse and its translation. Most research in this field is conducted by doing critical discourse analysis (CDA). But traditional CDA is subject to strong criticisms due to the limited number of texts analysed, which has led to an increased number of corpus studies recently. As for studies on the translation of political discourse in the Chinese context, much attention has been paid to translation techniques or strategies with few considerations given to the socio-cultural context in which translated texts are produced. Issues revolving around the relations between translation, society, and ideology in the Chinese political context still need to be addressed. The third part focuses on the Appraisal System and its application in discourse analysis and translation studies. It has been shown that although the theory has been widely used in different genres of monolingual texts, studies involving Appraisal across languages and cultures still remain insufficient (p. 35), and even more so in massive corpus-based studies in the Chinese context.

In Chapter 3, the theoretical framework of this research is outlined, that is, a combined framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model, followed by a detailed account of the corpus-based methodological procedures. The authors compiled a bilingual corpus consisting of official Chinese political texts and their translations, aligned at the sentence level. Then, Wordsmith 6.0 and Emeditor were used to retrieve the bilingual concordances containing China (Self) and other countries (Others). Different types of Appraisal epithets, modifying the two sides in Chinese texts, were accordingly coded. One point worth noting is that an inter-rater reliability test was conducted by two coders tagging epithets to the fourth level of Appraisal. The test helps avoid the subjectivity of semantic tagging to guarantee tagging consistency, and only results of third-level tagging were used in later analysis because they reached a high agreement of 0.92 (p. 67). Finally, the translation strategy and meaning shift of every Appraisal epithet were tagged in the bilingual corpus for further statistical analysis. A number of bilingual examples of tagging were also presented to illustrate how some semantic ambiguities are addressed.

Although the process for identifying Appraisal resources is a reasonable and feasible one, some problems also deserve our attention. First, as the authors state, Appraisal epithets only include “adjectives or adverbs which indicate the speaker’s or writer’s attitudinal views” (p. 66). The definition does not cover the lexical resources of other parts of speech in Appraisal, such as affective mental and behavioural processes in Affect, and reporting verbs and modal verbs in Engagement. Yet these are all crucial resources in realising major functions of sub-systems in Appraisal. Second, the third-level tagging in Attitude can only distinguish very basic kinds of evaluation, such as emotional reactions, judgement of behaviours, and the evaluation of things. Detailed semantic features in the subsystems are very useful for identifying subtle semantic patterns in a corpus, which may reveal covert use of evaluative language. But these cannot be obtained without analysing the semantic features of Appraisal on the fourth level. Third, the authors do not seem to specify how to tag invoked Appraisal resources though they claim that this study “takes into consideration both inscribed and evoked Appraisal meaning” (p. 55). The tagging of invoked Attitudes can be quite challenging as they are implicit evaluations, easily subject to coders’ personal experience and socio-cultural background.

Chapters 4 and 5 closely examine the distribution, meaning shifts and translation strategies of Appraisal epithets, statistically, within each sub-category of the semantic framework of Appraisal and in both the Self- and Other-categories. Chi-square Tests for Independence were conducted for every Appraisal sub-category to find any statistical association, firstly between the country categories (Self vs Others) and translation strategy (Equivalent vs. Non-equivalent) and, secondly, between Appraisal polarity (Positive/Expansion/Up-scale vs. Negative/Contraction/Down-scale) and translation strategy (Equivalent vs. Non-equivalent). It is reported that, in general, non-equivalent translation strategies are much more often adopted to render negative Appraisal epithets in the Other-category than their counterparts in the Self-category (p. 178). The authors further explore the meaning shifts in different non-equivalent translation strategies and categorise them into three types of stance variations, namely, stance equalled, stance upgraded and stance downgraded. A Chi-square test was also done to examine the association between stance variations and country categories. It was found that Self-items are more likely to be down-graded while Other-items up-graded, which is contrary to the existing Ideological Square Model (p. 159).

Chapter 5 provides some reasons for translation shifts and the variations of stance described above. The first one comes from the linguistic difference between English and Chinese. Verbs in Chinese tend to collocate with adverbs, which only serve to fit in rhythm or make a clause a complete one. These adverbs do not have any concrete meaning to modify verbs and will usually be omitted when the collocation is translated from Chinese to English. The second explanation is the need for politeness. The translators of Chinese political discourse tend to mitigate China’s positive evaluations and other countries’ negative evaluation to shape China as a personified polite figure. It is argued that the General Strategy of Politeness (Leech 2014: 91) has become normative constraints on the English translation of Chinese political discourse as discourse practice (p. 165). Third, the variations of stance are also due to a two-layered Ideological Square. The authors propose a revised version of the Ideological Square Model where superficial and deeper layers are distinguished. The former is governed by the General Strategy of Politeness, while the latter by a self-serving principle (p. 171). The translators’ negative self- and positive other-presentation gives China a polite image on a superficial level and, at the same time, serves China’s interests by keeping a low profile and by not being aggressive at a deeper level.

Tao Li and Kaibao Hu’s explanations draw upon not only the linguistic perspective but also socio-cultural and ideological ones. However, neither a linguistic nor ideological account is based on a systemic exploration of an existing theory. The former could have drawn insights from sound comparative linguistic theories between English and Chinese, though the corpus research for cross-lingual collocation in Chapter 5 is impressive. The latter is also supposed to employ a holistic CDA approach to analysing the dialectical relationship between discourse and society in which discourse practice serves as the intermediate. Although Ideological Square is introduced and the concept of discourse practice is mentioned when the authors are discussing variations of stance, they do not explore in detail how the translation is produced, distributed and consumed as institutional routines in Chinese political contexts (Fairclough 1992: 72), nor do they closely examine the categories of contexts (van Dijk 2008: 76). Compared with sufficient data description, the explanation section may need elaboration.

The last chapter summarises the major findings, contributions and prospects for future studies. Tao Li and Kaibao Hu think that the modes (interpreting vs. written translation) and genres of translation should be taken into consideration when Appraisal epithets are analysed. They also admit that triangulation is needed to echo the results of corpus data, such as interviews, questionnaires, and other ethnographic approaches. Finally, the limitations of the scope of research, “Appraisal epithets,” are also mentioned. Future studies in this field are encouraged to enlarge the scope of Appraisal resources, to adopt a diachronic perspective, and to draw insights from other disciplines (p. 186).

In sum, this book is of great value to existing knowledge of translation studies in the area of political translation in general and, in particular, the Chinese context. The two-layered Ideological Square Model is obviously the most prominent theoretical contribution. It has proven to be very useful in analysing China’s institutional translation of political texts, especially when it comes to the stance-taking of Chinese translators. Another strong point is the pioneering combined framework of Appraisal System and the Ideological Square Model, which may shed light on corpus-based CDA approach to translation studies. Researchers interested in uncovering inequality and power relations behind discourse would find this framework feasible, especially with corpus methodology. The quantitative work in this study is of course a great strength, but it is, perhaps, lacking in the description of detailed semantic patterns and Appraisal resources of other POS deemed outside the scope of Appraisal epithets. Readers may also find the explanation section insufficient, such as the examination of situational, institutional and socio-cultural contexts in this work. These contexts hold the key to exploring the dialectical relationships between discourse and society that help to reveal hidden ideologies.