A Report On The Application Of Structural Shifts In The English To Chinese Translation Of A Research Text On COLREGs

Since the 21st Century,marine transport in China has become more and more prosperous,which is playing an important role in international shipping.Meanwhile,the development of shipping has greatly enhanced the communication and the cooperation between China and other countries.As we all know,marine transport cannot exist without ships.With the increasing number of ships,it is more difficult for us to manage the risks of collisions.Therefore,the author picked and translated some excerpts of a text studying The International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea,COLREGs.The cases listed in the text can help to understand and learn COLREGs.As a maritime text studying COLREGs,passive voice,nouns as well as nominalized structure are used in the original text to expound objective facts.It is known for all that English and Chinese,with different features,belong to different language systems.If translation practice between the two languages are done by the method of word by word and sentence by sentence,it will surely cause confusions.With the contents of target text are faithful to the original text as much as possible as the precondition,the biggest issue in this translation process is to translate the passive voice,nouns and nominalized structures into Chinese with the method of structural shifts.With the reference of the exposition of structural shifts in Catford's translation shifts theory,the author will analyze the guidance role played by structural shifts in the translation practice.