| When working as an intern at SUNTHER,a translation company in Wuhan,the translator translated a part of the 2015 edition of the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code(BPVC),which is chosen as the source text in the translation practice report.On the basis of Catford's translation shifts,relevant translation difficulties and strategies are discussed and analyzed.The ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code is a typical technical document,and its language is very accurate,concise,and plain.At the lexical level,there exist lots of technical terms and some compound nouns;at the syntactic level,there are many long sentences with quite complicated structures and a number of imperative sentences which have the function of instruction;at the grammatical level,modal verbs shall and may are frequently used,and the present perfect tense appears occasionally.Moreover,the text contains quite a few figures,tables and symbols.In a word,the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code is an informational text whose language is very logical.Translation shifts is a translation theory put forward by J.C.Catford,an eminent linguist and translation theorist,in his book A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics in 1965.Catford indicates that translation shifts are the departures from formal correspondence in the translation process.Based on Halliday's systemic grammar,he usefully categorizes translation shifts into two major types: level shifts and category shifts which can be further divided into structure-shifts,class-shifts,unit-shifts(rank-changes),and intra-system-shifts.This translation practice report mainly discusses the translation difficulties and methods relevant to the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code,which consists of four parts.Firstly,the translator introduces the background of the task and the stylistic featuresof the source text.Secondly,the translator reviews the whole translation process,including the pre-translation preparations and the post-translation quality control.Thirdly,the translator introduces Catford's translation shifts,sums up the translation difficulties in terms of lexis,syntax,and grammar,and analyzes each translation method with examples on the basis of translation shifts.At the lexical level,the main difficulty is how to translate words in English which is a stative language into Chinese which is a dynamic one.To solve this problem,class-shifts can be used,for example,shifting an English noun to a Chinese verb.At the syntactical level,three difficulties are discussed,including how to translate passive voice in English to Chinese which has more active sentences,how to deal with the placement of long modifiers in English,and how to translate complex sentences in English.The first two problems can be solved using structure-shifts,and the last problem using unit-shifts.At the grammatical level,the first difficulty is how to translate the two high-frequency modal verbs shall and may in the source text,and the second is how to translate the present perfect tense in English to Chinese which has no tenses at all.To solve these two problems,level-shifts can be used.Finally,the translator summarizes this report,and indicates that researches on Catford's translation shifts have not been put a high value on by Chinese translators all these years,therefore great tolerance and a broad mind are necessary in the future translation studies.However,the limitations of this theory cannot be ignored that Catford's translation shifts pay greater attention to the translation process and translation shifts,and rarely concern translation standards. |
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