ValTrad La valoración en traducción

The ValTrad project (Spanish acronym for 'Appraisal in Translation') is a five-year project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Mineco), reference number FFI-2013-42751-P. Its Principal Investigator is Anna Espunya. It will run until December 2018.

The general goal of the ValTrad Project is to study appraisal and its translation in two distinct fields, namely literary translation and legal and economy translation, to compare the translation strategies that are applied in each field, and to contrast the types of phenomena inscribing appraisal in different languages and genres.

In the framework of systemic-functional linguistics, appraisal is a resource to communicate interpersonal meanings, and is influenced by power and solidarity relations between participants. Attitude, engagement and graduation are subsystems of appraisal in turn comprising more specific categories. The interpersonal meta-function is found freely in literary texts, but it is also present in legal and economy texts.

This research project is motivated by the need to gain in-depth knowledge of the translator's intervention regarding appraisal, as it is essential for the interpretation of the text's meaning and the author's communicative intention. Appraisal theory offers a methodological advantage, namely its integrated approach to characterising the author's stance not only towards the material he is communicating but also towards his reader.