TITLE:
A Corpus-Based Study of Modal Verb Translation and Functional Reconstruction in Children’s Animated Films from the Perspective of Appraisal Theory
AUTHORS:
Jinxiu Chen, Fei Xu, Chenglong Liu
KEYWORDS:
Subtitle Translation, Modal Verbs, Bilingual Parallel Corpus, Appraisal Theory
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.6,
June
29,
2026
ABSTRACT: Existing studies on subtitle translation of animated film have mostly focused on language simplification and cultural adaptation, with insufficient attention paid to the systematic shifts and functional motivations of modal verbs—a core resource for expressing emotional attitude during translation. Based on a self-built small-scale English-Chinese bilingual parallel corpus, this study adopts a combined quantitative and qualitative analytical approach, utilizing the Appraisal Theory from Systemic Functional Linguistics as its framework to investigate Chinese translation strategies of modal verbs in animated film subtitles. It aims to reveal systematic differences in the distribution of modal strength between English and Chinese, and to explore how translators functionally reconstruct characters’ attitudes and stances through the transformation of modal resources. This research holds academic significance in uncovering the mechanisms of attitudinal meaning transfer in subtitle translation and in promoting interpersonal functional equivalence in children’s animated film translation.