A Report On C-E Translation Of Great China And Great People (Excerpts) Under The Guidance Of Translation Shifts Theory

The source text of this translation practice is selected from Great China and Great People written by Wang Zhigang,who is a leading Chinese strategic consultant.This book is published in 2020.As a book featuring regional culture,it interprets China’s native culture from a unique perspective,including descriptive statements of historical facts and logical explanatory statements.The translator has selected chapter two and chapter three for the translation practice.The translation shifts theory,proposed by Catford,includes level shifts and category shifts,and category shifts are further divided into structure shifts,class shifts,unit shifts,and intra-system shifts.This translation practice is finished under the guidance of this theory,aiming to summarize the translation methods adopted in the translation process.Firstly,the translator uses level shifts to shift the tenses and plural nouns from the lexical level in Chinese to the grammatical level in English.Secondly,due to the differences in grammatical structures between Chinese and English,structure shifts are employed to turn some active voice into passive voice,prepositional attributives into postpositional attributives,and topicprominent sentences into subject-prominent sentences.Thirdly,based on the feature of multiple verbs in the source text and the dynamic and static distinctions between Chinese and English,the translator analyzes the guiding role of class shifts in this translation practice from parts of speech,mainly involving the shifts from verbs to nouns and verbs to prepositions.Fourthly,unit shifts are used to translate fixed phrases and shift some sentences consisting of short clauses in the source text into logical and hierarchical English sentences.Finally,in order to reduce the cultural deficiencies in the translation process,culture shifts are added considering the cultural characteristics of the source text and the limitations of the theory.The translator hopes to offer an opportunity for those who appreciate regional culture to gain a deeper understanding of China’s excellent culture through this translation practice.Additionally,the translator hopes that this practice could serve as a reference for other translators who apply Catford’s translation shifts theory to guide culture texts.