A Practice Report On E-C Translation Of K-12 Education Reform: A Map Road (Excerpt)

Basic education is a fundamental project to cultivate talents and enhance national quality,which has played a prominent role in education reform in various countries.Bobby Jindal,governor of Louisiana,witnesses the situation that the overall level of the American education assumes the drop tendency and thus puts forward a plan K-12 Education Reform: A Map Road which is designed to improve American education.It consists of three principles: parent choice,limited government and educator freedom,and is aimed at restoring the balance between parents’ and teachers’ roles in education,and keeping away from the bureaucracies that stand as obstacles to change.Executive summary,introduction and principle No.1: parent choice are excerpted from translation project as the source text,which amounts to about 11,000 words.Firmly grounded in Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar,Catford published his work A Linguistic Theory of Translation in 1965,in which he refers to“translation” as “an operation performed on languages: a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another”(Catford,1965:7).However,different linguistic systems have different linguistic characteristics.In some cases,to achieve the textual equivalent,a translation shift inevitably occurs.The research strives to delve into the translation shift in English-Chinese translation.Firstly,the author probes into the characteristics of the text;secondly,based on the translation examples taken from K-12 Education Reform: A Map Road and the linguistic differences between English and Chinese,the author makes an analysis from the perspective of level and category shifts,that is,grammar,lexis,sentence.By the application of translation shift theory to the source text,the research draws a conclusion: Catford ’s translation shift theory is highly applicable in guiding translation practice,and the translator can adopt translation shift strategies to overcome the difficulties in shifting between English and Chinese effectively: 1)on grammatical level: the translator can shift from the grammatical level(e.g.number,tense and aspect)to Chinese lexis;2)on lexical level: part of speech is converted tomake the translation be in line with the Chinese expression habits.For example,noun is shifted to verb;besides,the translator can adopt the unit shift to convert the lexis into phrases or phrases into sentences;3)on sentence level,the translator can use the structure shift and convert the subject-prominent sentences into topic-prominent sentences,passive voice into active voice,affirmative expressions into negative expressions,post-modifier into pre –modifier,etc.What is more,by translating the source text K-12 Education Reform: A Map Road,the author is expected to provide some reference on the translation practice and the translation relative to education,and offer some experience for domestic educators.