A Report On The Translation Of Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents （Chapter Three）

This thesis is a research report on the E-C translation of Chapter 3 of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,a nonfiction book which describes the racial persecution and social injustice in the United States’ history.The translation of this book has posed a great challenge for the present translator in the following respects.Firstly,the original text contains many descriptive words whose counterparts are hard to find in Chinese.Secondly,it features a lot of arguments whose logic is hard to follow in the first reading.Thirdly,it also involves many cultural items or historical myths which need careful rendering.Based on Catford’s and Al-Zoubi ＆ Al-Hassnawi’s models of translation shifts,this report aims to analyze the problems encountered in the translation process due to the significant differences between English and Chinese.More specifically,the report will deal with various kinds of shifts in translation at both micro and macro levels.At the micro level,it analyzes different cases of level shifts and category shifts,which further covers structure shifts,class shifts,and unit shifts.At the macro level,translation shifts that occur in textual component,pragmatic component,and stylistic component are discussed respectively.The case analysis reveals that the Theory of Translation Shifts is effective in overcoming the said translation difficulties,and helps to maximize semantic equivalence between source text and target text.