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 …