The Translation Of Historical Texts Under The Guidance Of Translation Shifts Theory

This paper is a translation practice report of the History of Serbia.History of Serbia is a kind of historical text with the characteristics of objectivity,accuracy and realism.The book mainly tells us the history of Serbia from the middle ages to the period before the Balkan wars broke out in 1892.In the process of translation,this paper finds that the original text uses more nouns,attributives,passive voice and other idiomatic expressions in English,which are the most prominent problems.As there are many differences in grammar,vocabulary and syntax between English and Chinese,if the text is translated completely in accordance with the original form,it is difficult to get a smooth translation while accurately conveying the original information.Therefore,it is necessary to shift the original form in the translation process.So,this paper aims to summarize the difficulties encountered in the process of translation practice and the translation methods used to overcome the difficulties,and explore the guiding role of translation shifts theory in the translation of historical texts,so as to ensure the objectivity and accuracy of the content of historical texts.The English translation theorist Catford is the first one to put forward the concept of “translation shifts” and divide translation shifts into level shifts and category shifts.Level shifts refers to shifts in lexical and grammatical perspective.Category shifts further explains the translation method from the aspects of part of speech,unit and grammatical structure,including part of speech shifts,unit shifts,structure shifts and intra-system shifts.In view of the typical problems encountered by the author in translation practice,the report only discusses and studies from the three perspectives of structure shifts,part of speech shifts and unit shifts in category shifts.Through typical examples in translation practice,this paper compares and analyzes the language features and differences between the source text and target text,explores how to translate historical texts under the guidance of translation shifts theory.Finally,it is found that structural shifts can solve translation difficulties caused by grammatical differences between English and Chinese.The shifts of part of speech can solve the translation difficulties caused by the differences between English and Chinese part of speech.When the source language cannot find its corresponding linguistic unit in the target language,unit shifts can help the translator select an appropriate linguistic unit in the target language according to the context and semantics,so as to form a correspondence with the source language.So this paper finds that translation shifts theory is an effective tool in the translation of historical texts.There have been many studies on the guiding role of translation theory in other types of text translation,but there are few studies in historical text translation.Therefore,this paper has certain reference value for the translation research of historical texts.