A Report On Chinese Translation Of Arctic Chill Under The Guidance Of Translation Shifts Theory(Chapter 16-21)

This is a report of the author of the paper's reflections on her translation experiences of a project.It was the Chinese translation of English novel Arctic Chill,in which she translated six chapters from 16 to 21.Since English and Chinese belong to different language families,there are great differences between them.These differences impose the author of the paper a lot of difficulties in her proper rendering of English words and sentence structure.As a result,the first version of the author of the paper's is rigid unnatural Chinese.Trying to conquer those difficulties,she finds the translation shifts theory very helpful in guiding her to improve her Chinese expressions.This theory was put forth by J.C.Catford,a famous Britain linguist and translation theorist.He divided translation shifts into two types,level shifts and category shifts.Level shifts refer to the transformation of grammatical and lexical levels between different languages.Category shifts involves structure-shifts,class-shifts,unit-shifts(rank-changes)and intra-system-shifts.Based on this theoretical framework,the paper did a lot of the case study in which the author reviewed her first version and compared those translations with the later revisions.After this study,the author reached a conclusion that this micro-level translation theory is especially applicable to guide the translation practice of English and Chinese for translation novice.