A Study Of Translation Shifts In The English Translation Of Chang Hen Ge

The full-length novel Chang Hen Ge(The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai)written by the famous contemporary woman writer Wang Anyi has been a great success in Chinese literary world ever since its publication in 1995.Wang Anyi used a large number of images as the carriers,and with a woman's unique delicacy compressed a city's history into the description of alleys.The work is regarded as “the modern epic of Shanghai”,because Wang Qiyao's daily life is embodied in the description of women in Shanghai,life in Shanghai,and nostalgia in Shanghai.The English version co-translated by Michael Berry and Susan Egan Chan got published in 2008 and it has been highly praised by western literary world.This is not only acknowledgement of the original novel,but also of the wonderful reproduction by the two translators.Readers of the translation have found there exist many differences or deviations from the source text and this can be explained with Translation Shifts Theory.“Translation shifts” is a concept put forward by J.C.Catford in 1965 in A Linguistic Theory of Translation.Catford divided the shifts into level shifts,category shifts,and emphasized component analysis and translation equivalence and he also discussed the practicability of Translation Shifts Theory in translation practice and has a profound influence on translation studies.This thesis analyzed the shifts or derivations in the English translation of Chang Hen Ge and confirmed the feasibility of applying this theory in Chinese-English translation of novels.Since only the sentence level and levels below the sentence were discussed in Catford's book,in order to make the analysis more comprehensive,this thesis has done the study from a macro perspective by extending to the level of“text shifts” based on Halliday's cohesive devices,and “culture shifts” with the help of Liu Weidong's “cultural transformation”.Doing case study and exemplification,the thesis analyzed the English translationof the novel from the aspects of level,category,text and culture shifts to explore the practicability of Catford's Translation Shifts Theory.The study results showed that understanding translation shifts can help translators faithfully convey the main idea and style of the original text and produce fluent translation.However integrating factors of text and culture is also important.It is hoped that the research can provide some reference for future study and more methods or strategies for C-E translation practice.