A Report On The Translation Of Scooped!(Excerpt)in The Light Of Catford's Theory Of Shifts

This report analyzes the translation of Scooped! in the light of J.C.Catford's theory of Translation Shifts,mainly focusing on level shifts,category shifts and cultural shifts that made during the process of translation,thus to explore the feasibility of Catford's theory in guiding the translation of texts on social science.Scooped! is authored by David J.Krajicek,a famous crime journalist and writer.In the book,Krajicek weaves together his own experiences as a crime reporter,the history of the genre and lots of examples to produce a convincing indictment of tabloid journalism,television networks and even those traditional media with credibility,all of which were keen on making sensational news reports in America then,and to explore the paradigm on crime news reporting and suggest reasonable strategies that news media should adopt when reporting stories of sensitive topics.This book has implications for the study on the communication characteristics of crime news reports in the context of new media,and also can be taken as reference for the study on the paradigm of China's crime news reporting and on the ways to avoid homogenization.The writer of this report translated the fourth and sixth chapters of the book,in which Krajicek discusses the anomie in crime news reporting by American news media and explores ways to regulate such reporting.It is an informative text of social science style.Therefore,the difficulty of the project lies in how to convey the message of the SL text to TL readers in a way that is understandable and acceptable.At the lexical level,difficulties mainly lie in the translation of compound words,idioms,nominalized expressions,and common nouns with special meanings in the context of journalism and communication.At the syntactic level,difficulties mainly lie in how to deal with long sentences which are compact in structure and complicated in logical relations.In order to solve the difficulties,the writer applies Catford's theory of Translation Shifts,according to which difficulties are settled by methods of level shifts and category shifts to correctly convey the information and make it understandable at the same time.In addition,cultural shift is supplemented for a dialectical understanding of thetheory of Shifts.In translating,the writer found that Catford's theory of Translation Shifts is highly applicable in guiding the translation of texts on social science;the variety of translation shifts is embodied in the transformation of multiple aspects in the same sentence;translation shifts are used throughout the process of translation,to achieve “translation equivalence”.It is hoped that the report can provide some reference for English-Chinese translation of texts in social sciences.