A Report On The English-Chinese Sentence Structure Shift In Informative Text Translation

The source of this translation practice report comes from the English book Global Food Futures: Feeding the World in 2050 written by Brain Gardner, a notable American agricultural analyst. This book mainly introduces and discusses various issues concerning the supply, need and security of global grain, which covers such fields as politics, economy, and environment and so on. With the second and fifteenth chapters as the source texts, the paper, based on the analysis of the text features and the differences between English and Chinese sentence structures, chooses the sentence structure as the study object and adopts the Translation Shift Theory as the theory prospective, then explores and summarizes the feasible ways of sentence structure shifts in informative text translation through detailed examples, so as to make the translation much more natural and smoother, as well as meet the needs and customs of the potential readers. The report mainly consists of six parts. The first part is the introduction of the source text and the significance of the translation practice. The second part describes the translation tasks, including the pre-preparation of translation, the features of the texts and the whole translation process in detail. And the Translation Shift Theory as well as the differences between English and Chinese sentence structure are clearly illustrated respectively in the third and fourth part. On the basis of this, the paper discusses the main sentence structure shifts and applies four useful translation methods to such kind of source text, namely combination, division, sequence adjustment and recasting, which constitute of the body of the paper, the case analysis part. For the last part, it mainly summarizes the gains and inspirations during the process of translation practice, as well as the problems to be solved.