A linguistic analysis of two sample political speeches based on Munday’s (2012) appraisal model

This study intended to use Munday’s (2012) model of appraisal theory and study strategy application by translators while translating two of President Rouhani’s political speeches from Persian into English. Based on this broad objective, two research questions were formulated: Q1. Do the seven strategies in Munday’s (2012) model appear similarly in each text pair?, and Q2. Do the two text pairs differ significantly with regard to the application of each single strategy as introduced by Munday (2012)? To undertake the study, two speeches (CNN’s Christian Amanpour’s conversation with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani addresses to the UN) by President Rouhani, The Islamic Republic of Iran’s President, were selected by purposive sampling to be used as data of the study. Terms denoting the appraisal theory were extracted from the two original speeches and then their English equivalents were extracted from the English Versions and then analyzed in terms of the strategies used during the translation process. The strategies and their features were extracted from Munday (2012). Chi-square tests were used to answer the two questions of the study. The results revealed that both translators had used all the seven strategies introduced by Munday (2012) though with varying frequencies. Further, when the two translators were compared with regard to the application of each single strategy, again it was observed that the two translators were statistically different, that is, the two translators had used each strategy significantly differently. Finally, it was observed that ‘engagement’, ‘graduation’, and ‘judgment’ were the three strategies used most frequently by the two translators.