The Application Of Category Shift Theory In The E-C Translation Of Preposition And Prepositional Phrases In Scientific Text

The source text is the second part of the report Tracking Clean Energy Progress 2017,which is released by the official website of the International Energy Agency in 2017.The text introduces the progress that have been made by countries all over the world to achieve 2DS targets,and further illustrates the measures that should be taken in the future.The source text introduces energy science and technology with many long and complex sentences,and a large number of prepositions and prepositional phrases.However,not all of prepositions and prepositional phrases can be translated into Chinese counterparts.Prepositions are the links in sentences and paragraphs in English with a variety of functions,while verbs are more frequently used in Chinese.In view of these differences,it is necessary to have a more systematic understanding of the translation of prepositions and preposition phrases in the text.Catford’s translation shifts theory clearly summarizes the translation types in sentences,phrases and words,which is a practical guidance to translation practice.This project takes a large number of cases in the text under the guidance of translation shifts theory,and proposes the following techniques in the E-C translation.With class-shifts theory,prepositions can be translated into verbs or conjunction.With unit-shifts theory,prepositional phrases can be degraded to words or be upgraded to sentences.With structure-shifts theory,we can shift postposition attributives to preposition attributives,shift positive sentences to active sentences,and also change negative sentences to positive sentences.We hope that more strategies and methods can be proposed from the translation practice and study,so that translation-shifts theory can be better applied to prepositional and prepositional phrases translation.