A Report On E-C Translation Under The Guidance Of Translation Shifts Theory—A Case Study Of The New Silk Roads: The Present And Future Of The World(Excerpts)

This report analyzes problems in the E-C translation of The New Silk Roads—The Present and Future of the World and discusses solutions and translation strategies under the guidance of Catford’s translation shifts theory.In the E-C translation process,various problems will occur to prevent the translator from acquiring textual equivalence because of the distinctions between English and Chinese.The New Silk Roads-The Present and Future of The World belongs to informative text and is featured by strong normativity,specialty and logicality.At the lexical level,the text applied plenty of agentive nouns and nominalization while at the syntactic level,the use of passive,inanimate and compound sentences becomes the norm.Therefore,based on the analysis of linguistic features of the source text and the differences between English and Chinese,this report studies the phenomenon of translation shifts from the aspect of level shifts and category shifts(involving structure shifts,class shifts and unit shifts),the specific operation of shifts of tense and plural forms are elaborated and shifts of voices,shifts from nouns to verbs and from phrases to clauses are discussed.With all these “shifts methods” applied,the textual equivalence is finally achieved and the author testified the strong operability of J.C.Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory in translation of informative text.