An E-C Translation Report On Education Policy And Evaluation:A Context For Change(Excerpts) Based On The Translation Shifts Theory

Education plays a vital role in the development of a nation,society,family and individual.Education reform has also been a hot topic in China in recent years.In addition,the translator has been working in the education area for seven years and has been loving it.For the above reasons,this translation practice report selects an excerpt from the book Education Policy and Evaluation: A Context for Change as the source text.It is written by Professor Louise K.Comfort in the University of Pittsburgh,which focuses on the shortcomings of American education policy and proposals for education reform.The selected material comes from the second chapter of the book,which mainly expounds the concept of education reform,the process of reform and the role of government departments in education reform.From the perspective of text type,the original text attaches importance to information transmission,belonging to informational text;from the stylistic point of view,its language is objective and fair,with little personal emotion,long sentences and strong logic,belonging to exposition.In the process of the translation,main difficulties encountered by the translator including how to ensure the consistency and accuracy of terminology,how to shift sentence structure to make it more consistent with characteristics of the target language,how to shift static expression of source language into dynamic of target language,and how to ensure textual cohesion from the word and sentence level.After sorting out and analyzing difficulties in translation,the translator believes that the consistency of terminology can be solved by reading parallel texts and establishing a glossary of terms.At the same time,the translator chooses Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory as the guiding theory of this translation practice to help her solve other translation difficulties.Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory focuses on information transfer rather than formal equivalence.It mainly includes level shifts and category shifts.This report analyzes specific cases from the perspective of category shifts.Category shifts include structure shifts,unit shifts,class shifts and discourse shifts.Structure shifts guide the translator to shift English passive voice into Chinese active voice,shift post-attributive to pre-attributive,subject-prominent sentences to topic-prominent sentences,and shift English sentences with inanimate subjects into Chinese animate subjects sentences to fit the idiomatic expression of target language.Class shifts refer to the shifts between different word classes of the source and the target language,converting nouns,adjectives and prepositions into verbs to achieve a dynamic expression of target language.Unit shifts change the elements in long and difficult sentences of the source text into elements of different levels in the target language to achieve the purpose of reasonable sentence organization.In order to ensure the coherence of the target text,discourse shifts help the translator to replace repeated semantic and reorganize the paragraph from the view of full text.This translation practice report has certain reference value for the translation of educational texts.