The Manifestation Of Catford’s Translation Theory Of Class-shifts In E-C Translation Practice

English and Chinese are different in many ways. For one thing, they exhibit distinctive features in their structures, English being static and Chinese being dynamic. In other words, actions in English are often expressed by nonverbal words while in Chinese verbs are used more often to perform multiple functions. In English Chinese translation, a static English sentence is sometimes translated into a dynamic sentence in Chinese by means of "class- shifts" as Catford described it. In the paper, the author investigated how the linguistic features of the two languages should be dealt with in the practice of translation from English to Chinese. The translation of chapter two of Jane Austen, Game Theorist by Michael Suk-Young Chwe was analyzed in detail with a focus on the phenomenon of "preponderance of nouns over verbs" in English and related translation technique of "class-shifts" when translating English text into Chinese.