A Report On The E-C Translation Of How To Make Mistakes In Python(Excerpt)

Advances in Internet Technology have driven social changes and influenced the way people live and work.An incessantly growing number of office workers are applying computer science technology,including programming in their work.Python,one of the programming languages,is widely adopted in various industries.As Python is general-purpose,versatile and popular for all professions,there is a rising demand for translating guiding books about Python.This report is based on the English-Chinese translation of How to make mistakes in Python,a computer-science guiding book during the author’s internship at Inspur Group.In the process of trial translation,the author was confronted with difficulties in handling lexical,syntactic and discourse translation.While seeking for theoretical guidance,the author found the Translation Shifts theory helpful and practical in translating obscure expressions and handling sentence structures.So category shifts and level shifts of Translation Shifts theory were decided to be applied in the translation.This report first introduces the translation preparation and translation process,including conducting text analysis to describe the linguistic features,genre features and stylistic features of the source text.It then elaborates on the theoretical framework of Translation Shifts theory.Principles for the translation of popular science texts to be content-oriented,accurate,accessible and literary are presented.By case analysis,translation strategies under the guidance of Translation Shifts theory are presented and discussed from perspectives of category shifts(class shifts,structure shifts,unit shifts)and level shifts.In this way,the translation can maintain the semantic content of the original text while retaining its linguistic features,genre features and stylistic features.Through this practice,the author concludes that Catford’s Translation Shifts theory is a practical guidance for translating words,phrases and sentences.The author is inspired that effective translation theory needs to be flexibly combined with strategies and bilingual differences.It is expected that this report can serve as a reference for other translators in applying translation theory.