A Report On The E-C Translation Of Sci-tech Texts For Dynamic Monitoring Of Climate Change Science Letters

The author has completed English-Chinese translation of eight sci-tech texts with 10,642 words for The Bureau of Intelligence Research of Lanzhou Information Center,Chinese Academy of Sciences.All the source texts are primarily concerned with current researches and policies of energy development and global fights against climate change.Before translation,the author made thorough study and analyses on the linguistic features of source texts and parallel texts.These sci-tech texts focus on content,requiring invariance in transfer of their content.However,due to the huge differences between Chinese and English,it is almost impossible to achieve absolute equivalence in E-C translation.As a result,departures from formal correspondence are likely to appear in the process of going from the source language to the target language,which is defined as “translation shift”.Therefore,the author decided to complete E-C translation under the guidance of Catford's translation shift theory.In the translation process,with the combination of linguistic features of source texts,requirements from entrusting party and target language habits,the author achieved various translation shifts on and below the level of sentence,avoiding variance in transfer of original information and presenting the TL in a familiar linguistic form.A few dozen translation examples are listed in this report for the analysis of level-shifts and categoryshifts in E-C translation whereby this report testifies that Catford's translation shift theory is fairly effective for E-C translation of informative text,particularly the sci-tech text.It is suggested that Catford's translation shift theory is not hard rules,and personal preference of the translator has an impact on the choice of translation shifts.