A Report On The E-C Translation Of An Excerpt From World War Ⅱ:A Beginner’s Guide From The Perspective Of Translation Shifts Theory

The translation materials are selected from the first three chapters of World War II:A Beginner’s Guide.The source text summarizes the key battles and historic choices in various battlefields during World War II,analyzes the underlying reasons,and reveals the legacy of war on humanity today.This text is a historical informational text characterized by objectivity and narrativity.Guided by Catford’s translation shifts theory,this report explores its application in the translation of historical texts by dealing with the linguistic difficulties such as numerous proper nouns,complex sentence patterns and various tenses of the source text.It is found that level shifts can deal with the expression of English tenses and singular or plural,and convert the morphological changes of English words into auxiliary words in Chinese.Category shifts can deal with the part of speech transformation at the word level,and convert common English nouns and prepositions into Chinese verbs.Structure shifts can cope with the shift between active and passive voices.Unit shifts can split English compound sentences into logical Chinese sentences.In this report,the translator uses case analysis to summarize the characteristics of historical texts and translation methods,and discusses the guiding role of Catford’s translation shifts theory in translating historical informational texts,hoping to provide some reference for translation work in related fields.