A Report On The E-C Translation Of Portrait Album Beyond Likeness(Excerpt) From The Perspective Of The Translation Shifts Theory

This thesis is a practice report on the English-Chinese translation of the portrait album Beyond Likeness.Painted and written by Scottish painter Victoria Crowe,Beyond Likeness is a collection of portraits with autobiographical colour.This practice report analyzes the typical cases in translation practice from the perspective of translation shifts theory and combines it with fine arts text,thus to explore the applicability of translation shifts theory to fine arts text translation.Examples cited in this paper are all from the first 24 pages of the translation project Beyond Likeness,containing the Directors' Foreword,the Introduction,and a preface by Duncan Macmillan.As it involves the painter's understanding of her works,therefore,the author often needs to analyze the illustrations in the book during the process of translation.In addition,the language style of the source text belongs to an obscure artistic language style and involves philosophy,religion,psychological perspective,painting genre,and other fields;therefore,in the process of translation,in order to make the expression of the target language more consistent with the Chinese expression habits,the author has to make some grammatical or structural adjustments,so as to make the source language and the target language achieve the maximum degree of “equivalence” in meaning.In the case study,the author analyzes the language conversion from the two aspects of level shifts and category shifts,in which the category shifts is further subdivided into structural shifts,class shifts and unit shifts.By using this theory to analyze the structural differences between English and Chinese,the readability of the translation can be improved.