Report On Academic Text Translation Based On Catford's Translation Shift Theory

This paper is a report on academic text translation.The material translated is the Part One of Cooperative Learning and Writing,a collection of essays on English teaching.In view of the large number of terminologies in academic texts,the prevalence of nominalization,the high frequent occurrence of passive sentences and compound sentences,and the difficulties encountered in the process of translation,it is believed that Catford's translation shift theory has great significance in guiding the translation of academic texts.Catford is a famous British linguist and translation theorist.In the book A Linguistic Theory of Translation,Catford puts forward the concepts of text equivalence,formal correspondence and translation shift based on Halliday's systematic functional linguistics.Catford's translation shift theory refers specifically to the departures from formal correspondence in the process of going from the source language to the target language.Two major types are included in Catford's translation shift theory: level shift and category shift;and category shift can be categorized further into structure shift,unit shift,class shift and intra-system shift.Based on Catford's translation shift theory,this paper discusses the level shift,structure shift,unit shift and class shift respectively in the practical translation from the perspective of the differences between English and Chinese.Through analysis and research,it is assumed that although Catford's translation shift theory has shortcomings,the theory has certain guiding significance for the translation of academic texts.It is hoped this report can provide some help and reference for the future translation researchers and scholars who are interested in applying translation shift theory to the study of academic texts similar to the monograph Cooperative Learning and Writing.