A Critique Of The Effectiveness And Limitations Of Catford's Theory Of Translation Shifts

The concept of "shift" is defined by Catford as "departures from formal correspondence in the process of going from the SL to TL". The means of shift has always been one of the most basic devices in translation practice. The very word "translation" in itself denotes the process of one language being shifted to another. This thesis lays its theoretical foundation on Catford's theory of translation shifts, and presents a detailed description of the structural differences from the linguistic angle between source-language text and target-language text. However, "shift" is not only confined to the level of syntactic structure, but could be extended to textual, pragmatic and cultural levels as well.This thesis aims to carry out a multi-layer research on both micro-level and macro-level. On the micro-level, the thesis applies Catford's linguistic model of analysis, that is to say, the analysis on lexical-syntactic level. Through the introduction of the concept of shift, especially four shifts such as "structure shifts", "class shifts", "unit shifts", also called "rank shifts", which is subordinate to the notion of "category shifts". On the basis of the structural characteristics of English and Chinese languages, it intends to explore some regularities of English-Chinese translation of shifts.However, Catford's theory has some deficiencies. The shift model he proposes only takes effect on and below the level of sentence, and does not take textual and pragmatic factors into account. Other critics point out that his theory overlooks non-linguistic level like cultural elements. In view of this, the macro-level textual, pragmatic and cultural analyses provide a remedy for this weakness. On the textual level, the concepts of cohesion and coherence of Halliday and Hasan are adopted; on the pragmatic level, the thesis draws support from the Cooperative Principle of Grice, the Politeness Principle of Leech, the Face Theory of Brown & Levinson, and analyses the dialogues in the novel Emma; on the cultural level, Eugene Nida's views on five types of sub-culture is adopted to facilitate the cross-cultural translation.Through the comparison and analyses of two Chinese versions of Emma, this thesis makes a tentative attempt to expand on translation shifts taking place on various levels. The thesis concludes that only when such aspects as words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, texts, pragmatics and culture being thoroughly considered could readers get the full picture of a text.