Structure Shifts In English-chinese Literary Translation—a Comparative Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of Wuthering Heights

Translation shifts play a decisive role in translation. According to Catford, structure shifts are amongst the most important ones in the classification of translation shifts. Though studies on translation principles or strategies have prevailed in China for decades, and studies on English-Chinese literary translation have also been various and numerous, few scholars have done in-depth researches on actual shifts in English-Chinese literary translation at grammatical, syntactic and semantic levels. Owing to the inherent differences between English and Chinese, translation shifts are inevitable in English-Chinese literary translation except when translators deliberately reproduce the structures of the original texts.This thesis, adopting Catford's theory of translation shifts, especially structure shifts, as its theoretical framework, compares the similarities and differences concerning structure shifts between the two Chinese versions of Wuthering Heights in the following respects: negative-affirmative shifts; voice shifts; shifts from English prepositional phrases to Chinese verbal phrases; shifts from English non-animate subjects to Chinese animate subjects; shifts from predicates to compliments and shifts from object compliments to predicates. For the sake of convenience, the data for our research consists of sentences (1595 in total) from nine chapters of the English original Wuthering Heights and the corresponding chapters from the two Chinese versions by Yang Yi and Fang Ping respectively. Through the analysis of the grammatical structures of the 1595 sentences, it can be found that the total of the original sentences whose structures need to be shifted in English-Chinese translation is 326, and both translators have made appropriate structure shifts to 81% of them, 263 sentences to be exact, which shows that structure shifts are essential in producing successful Chinese versions of English literary works. Based on the comparative study, it can also be found that to make the translation acceptable to Chinese readers, translators should shift the structures of original sentences in accordance with Chinese common usage when formal correspondence is impossible to be achieved.