On Translation Of Political Documents From The Perspective Of Catford’s Theory Of Translation Shift

As one of the birthplaces of Chinese civilization and Chinese nation, Henan province has a profound culture with a long history and rich labor resources. In recent years, the rise and development of Henan’s economy plays an important role in the process of China’s internationalization, so the introduction and publicity of Henan’s policies on economy are particularly important. This research takes part of Outline of Building a Moderately Prosperous society, Speeding Up Modernization in Henan Province as the model for translation. This outline summarizes the development strategy in economy, politics, culture which plays an important role in showing the strategy of economic development in the future.The outline is a typical political document characterized by precise words, simple sentence patterns. Because of the political significance, the accuracy and consistency of the contents between the source language and the target language should be guaranteed first. However, it is hard to realize the absolute equivalence due to huge differences between English and Chinese. Thus it is necessary to translate with a series of translation shifts. To fully study the shifts during translation, this paper is based on Catford’s translation shift which was put up in 1965. Catford attaches great importance to the translation shifts on and below the level of sentence including level shifts, structure-shifts, class-shifts, and unit-shifts which are instructive to translate political documents.Based on the theory of Catford’s translation shifts and taking the outline as the translation text, this paper studies from the following four parts:the first part is introduction, mainly taking about the significance and background of translation materials; the second part is literary review of translation shifts both at home and abroad and it also analyzes its applicability in political documents; the third part mainly focuses on the application of Catford’s shift theory in translation practice from the perspective of level shifts and category shifts; the last part is conclusion which summarizes translation shifts’important influence on the translation of political documents and aims at providing some enlightenment for scholars to research in the future.