A Report On The Translation Of Popular Science Texts Of Psychology From The Perspective Of Catford’s Translation Shift Theory

In the wake of the rapid development of the domestic economy and advancement of technology,the pace of people’s lives is gradually accelerating,and the various pressures that people face are gradually increasing.If people don’t pay attention to releasing these pressures,in the long run,a series of mental diseases may be caused.Among them,depression has become one of the most common psychological disorders in China,and young people are more exposed to depression.However,in China,most people still lack of knowledge and understanding about depression and the medical prevention and treatment of depression do not gain enough attention.Therefore,it is necessary to translate a popular science text in psychology that is related to depression under this background.And the report is excerpted from the book How to heal yourself from depression when no one else can: A Self-guided Program to Stop Feeling Like Shit.As a popular science text,the text is rigorous and accurate in content and lively in language style.It aims to popularize the relevant knowledge of depression to readers and how people with depression can save themselves,which requires the author to fully consider the discrepancies between English and Chinese during the process of translation so as to make the target text conform to the expression habits of Chinese readers and enhance the readability of the text.In addition,the source text includes many nominalization structures,passive structures,psychological terms,long sentences,etc.Excessive pursuit of formal correspondence between English and Chinese languages will only lead to expressions that do not convey the idea and misinterpret the meaning of the source text.So the content should be more important than the form when the source text is translated.However,Catford’s translation shift theory is aimed at achieving accurate information transmission at the expense of formal correspondence.So the author believes that this translation theory has momentous significance for the translation of popular science texts.Therefore,supported by Catford’s translation shift theory and based on two aspects of level shift and category shift,the report focuses on the expression differences between Englishand Chinese,and discusses the specific application of Catford’s translation shift theory in the E-C translation of popular science texts in psychology in combination with concrete case studies.