Passive Voice Translation Strategies In Military English From The Perspective Of Translation Shift Theory

Military English is informative,and content-oriented.Therefore,such texts requires information to be translated and conveyed accurately,which is what Catford referred to as textual equivalence.Catford,a British translation theorist,first proposed the concept of "translation shift",and categorized shift types occurring in translation on sentence and sub-sentence levels,based on relevant linguistic theories.For its applicability,clearness and practicability,the translation shift theory is applied in this paper to research into translation of passives.Examples in this report are excerpted from a thesis entitled "A Study of the Russian Acquisition of the French Mistral Amphibious Assault Warship".The thesis aims to explore the real intention and effect of the Russian navy in acquiring the French Mistral Amphibious Assault Warship.The original text contains a lot of military terminology and is written in plain English to achieve an accurate and objective presentation of the information.Many passive forms are applied in the thesis for the purpose of objectivity and preciseness,contributing to a large proportion of complicated and long sentences.These passive sentences add to the difficulties in the translation process,so it is necessary to explore the strategies for translating such sentences,especially the selection of subjects,in the hope of revealing some common patterns for translating similar texts in the future.This report demonstrates how the four types of translation shift,namely level,structure,class and unit shift,can be applied to passive voice translation,through a detailed analysis of examples.The analysis is conducted by chiefly focusing on how to select sentence subjects in the target language--Chinese.It is concluded that translation shift is a strategy applicable to passive sentences.However,translators need to make the choice according to different situations.The correct choice and application of shift theory is the result of constant translation practice and accumulation of translation strategies.