A Report On E-C Translation Of Climate Future: Averting And Adapting To Climate Change (Excerpts)

International academic exchanges have become increasingly frequent these days,and academic monographs in various fields have also increased.However,despite the abundance of translations of academic monographs,there has been little importation and translation of those on climate economics in China,and the introduction of the latest theoretical achievements has been relatively lagging.Therefore,in order to expand the translation of academic texts on relevant topics,this report chooses the seventh chapter of the latest academic work Climate Future: Averting and Adapting to Climate Change,by Robert S.Pindyck,a famous economist,as the translation source text and takes Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory as a guide,aiming at analyzing the strategies for solving the difficulties in academic translation.Firstly,the report analyzes the stylistic and linguistic features of the book and finds that the text is rich in vocabulary and language structure,with the typical characteristics of academic works such as applying plenty of terms,nominalizations,passive voice,and complex sentences.The difficulties mainly involve the translation of professional terms and the complex sentences.Therefore,it is important to learn the relevant knowledge through parallel corpus.Meanwhile,it is necessary to flexibly adopt various shifts to achieve the accuracy and readability of the translation.Secondly,based on Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory,this report discusses the translation skills used in the translation practice in terms of two aspects: level shifts and category shifts,along with specific examples.Among them,shifts from English plural form to Chinese numerals and shifts from English tense and aspect to Chinese function words are analyzed in level shifts.Category shifts can be divided into structure shifts,class shifts,and unit shifts.Structural shifts include shifts from English passive sentences to Chinese active ones and shifts from post-attributes to pre-attributes.In class shifts,shifts from nouns to verbs,shifts from adjectives to verbs,and other situations are well detailed.In unit shifts,the processing methods such as shifts from phrases to sentences,and shifts from sentences to sentence groups are discussed,aiming at providing reference for the translation of related parallel texts.Through this practice,the translator believes that Catford’s theory is of great guiding significance in translation practice,and the translator should adopt suitable shift strategies accordingly while translating,so as to improve the quality of translation.Therefore,this report intends to provide parallel texts for similar translations as well as references for related translation practices.