A Study On The Chinese Translation Of Aerospace Science English From The Perspective Of Catford’s Category Shifts Theory

Aerospace science and technology is the most highly integrated modem science and technology which emerged in the twentieth century and is one of the main measurable standards to reflect a country’s comprehensive national strength. And after entering the twenty-first century, aerospace science and technology constantly maintains an important position in promoting the original innovation, interdisciplinary communication and discipline integration. In the world today, attention must be paid to the significant influence of EST which is regarded as an important tool to promote the global exchange of science and technology with the rapid development of global economy and the increasing progress of worldwide science and technology. Therefore,more and more countries have devoted a large proportion of resources to research and translate the EST texts, especially including Aerospace Science English texts for the beneficial purpose of promoting and accelerating the peaceful exploration and development of scientific business. In the numerous previous researches and translations on technical literatures and technical books, a few of researches related to aerospace science English translation based on Catford’s Category Shifts Theory provide an opportunity for this thesis writing.Category Shifts Theory is one branch of Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory,containing four types, such as structure-shifts, class-shifts, unit-shifts, and intra-system shifts. The present thesis, on the foundation of Catford’s Category Shifts Theory, takes the partial Chinese translation of aircraft internal structures, flight details and flight examples of Boeing 777-200 displayed in the book Flying the Big Jets as examples and adopts the methods of literature research and qualitative research to synthetically analyze how to efficiently apply four kinds of shifts to the Chinese translation of aerospace science English. In the aspect of structure-shifts, an in-depth done from the perspective of changing the sentence structures; in the aspect of class-shifts, a familiarity with the lexical characteristics of English and Chinese and reasonable utilization of the shifts among different parts of speech are required to render the translations more smooth and natural, formal and rigorous; in the aspect of unit shifts, a reasonable shifts among five units make the translations concise and understandable; in the aspect of intra-system shifts, the direct translation of new terms and different denotative words may lead to wrong translations and comprehension difficulties since English and Chinese belong to different language systems.Therefore, use of intra-system shifts can avoid the phenomena that small errors make huge consequences.The research result shows that it is obvious to prove the practicability, operability and guidance of Catford’s Category Theory in the Chinese translation of aerospace science English,which can be used to render the translation of target text simpler and easier to comprehend while keeping the flavor of the original culture and can provide more meaningful references for the Chinese translation of aerospace science English and further researches as well.