On The Translation Of Popular Science Texts From The Perspective Of Catford's Translation Shifts Theory

The translation material of the paper is chosen from World Facts edited by Dr James Mackay.As an encyclopedic popular science text,the book presents a number of entries in alphabetical order,covering various topics such as arts,culture,geography,history and so on.It exhibits a variety of things and events in the world with simple and clear language,and objective and accurate facts,which is a very practical educational guide of popular science.Catford,an England translation theorist,firstly raised “translation shifts” and then developed it into his own translation shifts theory.Popular science texts primarily belong to informative texts and hence translators pay more attention to content than form when they translate the texts,which just conform to that Catford's translation shifts theory tends to stress textual equivalence at the cost of formal correspondence;moreover,given the wording characteristics of popular science texts and the practicability of this theory,the author considers that Catford's translation shifts theory owns significant guiding significance for the translation of popular science texts.In this paper,with a view to the differences between Chinese and English in some aspects such as grammar,words,ways of expression and so on,the author selects the part from letter A to letter B in World Facts as the translation text and Catford's translation shifts theory as the theoretical support,and combines example sentences in World Facts from level shifts and structure shifts,class shifts and unit shifts in category shifts to analyse the specific application of Catford's translation shifts theory in the translation of popular science texts,which can provide some enlightenment for scholars to further study the related translation.