Level Shift And Category Shift-A Practice Report On English To Chinese Translation Of Forestry Publications

Translation Workshop:Reading and Translating is a translation textbook to be published for graduates.The textbook is timely effective and covers many fields such as politics,economy,culture,forestry and environment.The author participated in the compilation of the textbook in July 2016.The whole translation process and methods are described and summarized in this paper after completing the translation practice of forestry chapters.The source text of forestry chapters in this textbook originates from Forestry of Oxford Journals.The articles are all related to academic papers in forestry field,which are characterized by its strong professionalism,high formality of language,prominent nominalization,and common grammatical phenomena such as passive sentences and long sentences.In the process of translation,the author is deeply aware of the differences between Chinese and English.Long sentences and clauses are mostly used in English,while short sentences are used in Chinese.Prepositions and nouns are mostly used in English,while verbs are preferred in Chinese.Passive voice is used in English and active voice is used in Chinese.Catford divides translation shift theory into level shift and category shift,in which category shift includes structure shift,class shift,unit shift and intra-system shift.In order to conform to the linguistic expression habits of the target text,the tense and aspect in English are transformed into corresponding Chinese vocabulary through level shift.The readability of nouns can be enhanced by transforming them into verbs through class shift.Through the structure shift,the passive voice will be converted to active voice,postpositional attributive to prepositional attributive and so on.Practical analysis shows that translation shift can effectively solve the differences between English and Chinese grammar,enhance readability,and has strong practical significance.