A Report On E-C Translation Of Agriculture Science And Technology Text Under The Guidance Of Translation Shift Theory

Science and technology occupy an important position in global economic and cultural exchange.With the development of globalization,science and technology are constantly communicated and shared between countries.The importance of science and technology texts,as important carriers of science and technology,is increasing.In the process of cross-cultural communication,it is difficult to have good scientific and technical communication without high-quality translation.Therefore,how to improve the speed and quality of scientific and technical translations should become one of the prior work of translators today.The translation of scientific and technical text covers a wide range of subjects.In this thesis,agricultural texts are selected for translation,with the aim of delivering agricultural scientific and technical information and providing practical techniques to the general public.Based on systemic functional linguistics,Catford’s Translation Shift Theory divided the “shifts” that occur in the translation process into two categories: “Level Shifts” and “Category Shifts”.Under “Category Shifts”,there are four shifts:“Structural Shifts”,“Class Shifts”,“Unit Shifts” and “Intra-system Shifts”,which basically cover the shifts on the level of lexemes,words,phrases,clauses and sentences.Catford’s Translation Shift Theory is highly applicable to the translation of agricultural science and technology texts,which are “content-oriented rather than form-oriented”.For the purpose of introducing practical agricultural techniques,the author has chosen to translate the agricultural science and technology text.The Container Tomato Garden Guide For Beginners,which focuses on how people living in cities use limited space to grow tomatoes in a variety of containers and has strong practical implications.This thesis uses the Catford ’s Translation Shift Theory as a guiding theory,and uses the case analysis method to analyze the selected material.Based on the characteristics of the selected material,the author explores the effectiveness of Catford’s Translation Shift Theory in guiding the translation of agricultural texts from multiple perspectives.Structural Shifts are commonly used to translate passive sentence,sentence with postpositive attribute and sentence with impersonal subject in English.Category Shifts are commonly used at the lexical level,such as the shifts between nouns,verbs and adjectives.Unit Shifts include shifts between words,phrases,clauses and sentences.Intra-system Shifts are required when terms in the source language have no corresponding expression in the target language.Therefore,the thesis argues that Catford’s Translation Shift Theory can help translators get rid of the formal constraints of the original text when translating agricultural texts and expressing the meaning of the original text accurately and fluently,which can be useful for the translation of such texts.