Application Of Catford's Translation Shifts Theory In China Daily's News Translation

This is a news translation report.The text materials selected in this report are English news translated by the author who has worked as an intern in the China Daily news agency.The contents of these pieces of news are about Chinese current politics,including the comments and prospects of the "The Belt and Road" initiative initiated by China,the foreign media's attitudes towards Chinese claims on international and regional hotspot issues,the analyses about the current situation of China's economic and trade development,the evaluations of Chinese social development,people's livelihood and environmental issues,as well as the analyses of China's diplomacy in the new era.The translation theory adopted in this report is the translation shifts theory put forward by J.C.Catford,one of the most representative translation theorists of the English language school.He conducted a systematic translation study from the perspective of applied linguistics on the basis of Halliday's system-functional linguistics,proposed such new concepts as textual equivalence,formal correspondence and translation shifts and explored the way to realize translation equivalence.In response to the sentential and sub-sentential level,Catford proposed that translation shifts can be divided into two categories:level shifts and category shifts,both of which can realize the equivalence between different language texts.In this paper,the author has analyzed the text materials from the aspects of level shifts and category shifts with reference to Catford 's translation shifts theory.In terms of the level shifts,the author will describe the shifts of tense and aspect as well as the singular and plural between English and Chinese.In regard to the category shifts,the author will analyze the target text from the perspectives of structure shifts,class shifts and unit shifts,which is in accordance with Catford's classification of the category shifts.Structure shifts include the shifts between active voice and passive voice,animate subject and inanimate subject,as well as the shifts of English postpositive attributives.Class shifts involves the change of the part of speech of English nouns,verbs,adjectives and prepositional phrases during the translation process.Unit shifts is related to the change of English grammatical units such as words,phrases,clauses and sentences.