Revoicing Polyphony in Documentary Translation: An Engagement-Based Study of Stance Reconstruction in The Power of Big Oil: Doubt

Abstract

Investigative documentaries are assembled from voices that do not carry equal authority: narration, interviews, corporate statements, archival clips, and expert testimony qualify, reject, or support competing accounts. A translation may reproduce the propositional content of these accounts while altering who seems to own a claim or how firmly it is presented. This article examines a Chinese research translation of “Doubt”, Part Two of FRONTLINE’s The Power of Big Oil, using the Engagement system of appraisal theory. The corpus initially contained 219 entries. Removing eight production markers left 211 language units and 6,878 English tokens. A second review of 267 candidate rows retained 202 Engagement resources: 37 Attribute, 46 Entertain, 94 Disclaim, and 25 Proclaim. The review counted an integrated multiword construction as one resource, excluded deontic and dynamic modality from Entertain, and distinguished dialogic positioning from degree and focus. Eight cases were then chosen across the four categories, including two relatively stable translations for comparison. The cases suggest that broad category equivalence can coexist with local changes in stance. A translation may distance a speaker from an earlier claim, make a possibility sound more expected, turn denial into a categorical refusal, or make evidential endorsement more explicit. The comparison is organized around voice attribution, propositional commitment, and dialogic space. Since the coding was completed by the researcher and has not yet been independently replicated, the frequencies are descriptive and no reliability coefficient or corpus-wide target-side shift rate is reported.