A Report On The Translation Of Vodka Politics(Excerpts)

The author chooses the tenth chapter to the eleventh one from Vodka Politics to complete the English-Chinese translation report.With telling about the reasons why Russians have been immersed in vodka so long,this book gives an in-depth analysis of the role how vodka plays in the Russian autocracy.So far,the book has not been translated yet.Speaking of translation theory,people will think more about the functional equivalence proposed by Eugene Nida.Influenced by Halliday's systematic grammar and language “level” classification,J.C.Catford,a famous British linguist,put forward the theory of shift translation,that is,the equivalence between the source language and the translated language.The shift theory is mainly divided into two parts,namely,level shifts and category shifts,while the latter is subdivided into structure shifts,class shifts,unit shifts,and infra-system shifts.Through the use of level shifts,the author of this report finishes transforming the English tense into the Chinese words,the singular and plural nouns into the Chinese words,the comparative and superlative degrees of adjectives into the Chinese words;through the use of structure shifts,the author also finishes the shift from the passive forms into active ones,from the negative sentences into the positive ones,from the long difficult sentences into few sub-clauses;through the use of class shifts,the author finishes the shift from the English nouns to the Chinese verbs,from the English prepositions to the Chinese verbs and so on;through the use of unit shifts,the author finishes the shift from the English words to the Chinese sentences,from the English phrases to the Chinese clauses.The author hopes that with the aid of the Catford's shift theory,the quality of her translation will be greatly guaranteed and the maximum “functional equivalence”will be achieved.This translation report is mainly made up of four parts.The first one is an introduction to the task description,which is subdivided into the text introduction,the author introduction and the report structure.The second one is the introduction oftranslation process,which is subdivided into preparations before translation,the translation assistance tools and post-translation modification;the third one is a case study,in which the translator makes the best use of the shift theory to guide her translation.The last one is to summarize and reflect on the insufficiency of this report.