Translation Of History Text From The Perspective Of Translation Shifts

Based on chapter 10 of the book,The Epic of America,this report discusses the translation of history text from the perspective and under the guidance of Catford's translation shifts.The Epic of America is written in 1931 by James Truslow Adams,an American writer and historian.This book gives a detailed description of the history of the United States,narrates America's origin and development in the first half of the twentieth century and further elucidated the “American Dream”.The author of the report translates chapter 10 of this book,and based on translation practice,the author has some reflection and analysis about the translation process and result from the perspective of translation shifts.“Shifts” is the most basic method in translation,and Catford is the first one to put forward the concept of “shifts”.The translation shifts theory has two main types,namely level shifts and category shifts.Level shifts involves four aspects: grammar,lexis,phonology and graphology.But in English-Chinese translation,the level shift exists only between grammar level and lexis level.There are four types of shifts happening in the category type: structural shifts,class shifts,unit shifts and intra-system shifts.As for structural shifts,it mainly involves shifts between passive voice and active voice,between subordinate clauses and short sentences,between pre-modifiers and post-modifiers,and between positive sentences and negative sentences.Class shifts refer to shifts between nouns and verbs,shifts between prepositions and verbs,and shifts between adverbs and verbs.In addition,unit shifts are divided into shifts between phrases and sentences and shifts between clauses and phrases.Intra-system shifts mean that the structure of the source language approximately corresponds in form to the structure of the target language,and non-corresponding terms should be chosen in the target language.The author chooses the translation shifts theory based on her own translation experience to study the English-Chinese translation of the excerpted chapter from a linguistic point of view.Guided by the above the translation shifts theory,the author adopts some translation strategies(literal and free translation;foreignizing and domesticating translation)and techniques(inversion,omission,amplification,negation,division,etc.)based on the analysis of the differences between the source and target languages.The author believes that by using the translation shifts,the obstacles in the translation process can be removed,the style and meaning of the source text can be fully conveyed,and the targeted text will be presented fluently.It is suggested that translators who translate history texts could flexibly adopt translation strategies and techniques based on the understanding of translation shifts theory.Of course,Catford's theory of translation shifts has shortcomings.It only includes inner-sentence shifts,but some shifts which belong to above-sentence shifts(such as style shifts,rhetoric shifts and pragmatic shifts)are not involved in the theory.