Application Of Translation Shift Theory To E-C Translation Of Urban Transit

With the rapid development of economy and urbanization, more and more cars and taxis appeared in cities. Traffic jams become an inevitable result of this phenomenon. This trend indicates that cities in our country should endeavor to develop urban transit. Some cities in foreign countries have undergone the traffic problems and thus accumulated abundant experience in dealing with traffic jams. Therefore it is important for our country to learn from them. However there are few studies on urban transit translation; it’s not easy for translators in this field to find essential references to improve themselves, so studies on this translation project are important. This thesis, from the perspective of Catford’s translation shift, reports the author’s experience as a translator of a part of the translation project for the book named Urban Transit Systems and Technology.In this thesis, Catford’s translation shifts are used to analyze the project, in which level shifts and category shifts are included. The contents of this translation project are quite similar to the style of English for science and technology (hereinafter shortened as EST), paying special attention to the expression of information. The translation of such kind of texts mainly focuses on the level of sentences and phrases. What’s more, the translated version is to be used as a textbook, the language of which should be unified and formal; so the report mainly focuses on the sentence level or the level below sentences. Last but not the least, because of the differences between Chinese and English, the translator should translate the source text (hereinafter shortened as ST) according to the requirements of the readers in target language, thus shifts between sentences and phrases are needed, which are consistent with Catford’s translation shift theory. Therefore the author of this thesis uses his theory to analyze this translation project.This thesis is divided into four parts. It starts from the general introduction, introducing the background information, the task and preparation work of the project, giving readers a brief understanding of the translation project. The second part is a theoretical framework, which provides theoretical guidance for translators and makes the translated version more suitable. Then, through the careful and detailed analyses of the source text, the author identifies characteristics of it. From the perspective of words, a large number of technologic words and words that need to change the part of speech are used, adding the difficulty to the translation project. In addition, passive sentences and complex sentences are used frequently for the sake of objectivity, all of which determines the following analyses of difficulties in this translation project. As the main part of this thesis, Chapter Four focuses on how the translation shift is applied to the analyses of the project, from which some valuable experience and lessons can be got.Through the detailed and careful study and analyses of this translation project, the author finds the general strategies of translating urban transit English. Translators of this subject can use level shifts and category shifts to improve the translation speed and accuracy. Besides, translated version under the guidance of translation shift theory meets the requirements of the readers better. Lastly, translators in urban transit English should know about the professional knowledge of urban transit, machinery and other relevant knowledge.