A Report On The E-C Translation Of English Colonization And Empire (Chapter 7) From The Perspective Of Translation Shifts

Defeating Spanish Armada in 1588,Britain became the second sun-never-set empire.Under the pen of Alfred Caldecott,a world-famous English historian,English Colonization and Empire shows a colony panorama of British Empire from war,government,economy,laborer,race,education and religion.The report is written on the basis of the translation practice of chapter seven in the book,the Government of the Empire.The source text describes the government over the colonies of early colonial powers like Spain,Portugal,Holland and France,the different types of the British colonies and prospect of their development.With the assistance of parallel texts,reference books,online tools,proofreading and evaluation,the translation quality is further improved.This report includes five chapters.The background,aims and significance of the translation task are introduced in chapter one;the features of source text in lexis,syntax and text are analyzed in chapter two;the process of before translation,while translation and after translation is described in chapter three;the case analysis under the guidance of Translation Shifts raised by Catford is given in chapter four;and the conclusion is drawn in chapter five.With the guidance of Translation Shifts,this report presents the examples of shifts of tenses,voice,subjunctive mood,plural forms,comparatives,components in sentences,parts of speech,and shifts from subject-prominent sentences to topic-prominent ones,from clauses and phrases to sentences.In addition,because intra-system shifts exist between languages from the same language family,the limitation of intra-system shifts in guiding English to Chinese translation is also pointed out.By the translation practice,the translator gets deep understanding on the information about governments of the British colonies,the theory of Translation Shifts and all the steps of an entire translation task and realizes the significance of affluent knowledge base and high capacity for collecting effective information and dealing with emergencies,providing reference for other translation practices.