An E-C Translation Report Of The Academic Text From The Perspective Of Catford’s Translation Shift Theory

This translation practice report selects Part I and chapter I of Part II of A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education as translation materials.The purpose of the report is to analyze the difficulties encountered in the translation process,the translation methods and strategies used.The source text is educational philosophy work,and raises questions of education from the root of human problems.The selected parts focus on the primary goals for improving education,and the design and implementation methods of nature teaching.Professional nouns are common in the text,and complex sentence patterns such as passive sentences and compound sentences appear frequently.The text is with strong reasoning and relatively rigid and rigorous language,which accords with the typical characteristics of academic texts.English translator J.C.Catford follows Halliday’s systematic functional linguistics and analyzes the language function in context from the perspective of linguistics.On the basis of equivalence theory,Catford puts forward the concepts of text equivalence,formal correspondence and translation shift.Translation shift mainly includes level shifts and category shifts.Category shifts include structure shifts,class shifts,unit shifts and intrasystem shifts.Guided by translation shift theory,this thesis discusses the guiding role of translation shift theory in academic text translation from two aspects,level shifts and category shifts.At the aspect of level shifts,the author discusses the guiding role of the theory in the translation of academic texts from the aspects of the tense of verbs and plurals.At the aspect of category shifts,this thesis systematically analyzes the translation from four types of shifts,involving active and passive voice,preposition and postposition of attributives,shifts of the word classes,etc.Based on the above research,the author believes that translation shift theory plays a guiding role in the translation of academic texts in terms of lexical,syntactic and discourse.This translation practice is of certain significance to the understanding and study of translation shift theory,and may provide a new path for the translation of similar academic texts.