A Report On The E-c Translation Of The Psychology Of Salesmanship From The Perspective Of Translation Shifts Theory

The Psychology of Salesmanship,written by American writer and psychologist William Walker Atkinson,involves two disciplines of psychology and sales strategies.It uses a psychological approach to salesmanship and introduces the application of psychology in sales activities systematically and scientifically.Atkinson points out in his book that the sales process is essentially a psychological process and analyzes the psychology of the salesman and the buyer in detail,so that the readers would have a deeper understanding of the psychology of purchase behavior.The current translation works are mainly related to sales books,but rarely focus on sales books written from the perspective of psychology.The author chooses three chapters with a total number of more than 13000 words as the source text and writes a report based on the translation.Based on Cartford's translation shifts theory,this report studies the cases of translation shifts in the translated chapters selected from The Psychology of Salesmanship from the aspects of level shifts and category shifts.In 1965,Catford advanced a new theory named “translation shifts theory”.Then his theory is widely considered as a reference for translation practice at a micro level.In his book A Linguistic Theory of Translation,Catford points out that there are two major types of “shift”:level shifts and category shifts,and he further refines the category shifts into four branches of unit shifts,structure shifts,class shifts and intra-system shifts.This report introduces the parallel texts that the author consulted and the translation tools used during the process of translation,analyzes the textual features of the selected chapters to be translated,and briefly introduces Catford's translation shifts theory.The typical examples mentioned in the report involve the shifts of tense and number;passive-active shifts,affirmative-negative shifts,shifts between post-modifier and pre-modifier,shifts between inanimate subject and animate subject;noun-verb shifts,preposition-verb shifts and adverb-adjective shifts;group-word shifts,group-sentence shifts and shifts between sentence and sentence groups;and the intra-system shifts reflected on English and Chinese idioms.In the process of translation and analysis,the author finds that a sentence or phrase can be translated with the help of multiple shifts.Translators should choose appropriate strategy of shifts in the light of specific situation so as to get a smooth translation.The author hopes that this report can enrich the research on the application of Catford's translation shifts theory and offer reference for those who are interested in the translation of the field of psychology.