Report On The Chinese To English Translation Of 2018 Looking China Youth Film Project(Excerpt)

Translation is a cross-cultural communication activity.In the context of the “Belt and Road Initiative”,cultural exchanges between China and other countries have been carried out in depth,and the demand for translation has been increasing.Looking China is a Chinese and foreign youth cross-cultural project hosted by the Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture(AICCC).The project aims to enhance the influence and attractiveness of Chinese culture through the unique perspectives of young foreign filmmakers,each of whom finished a 10-minute short film themed on Chinese culture.It has been successfully held for nine years so far.The project is gaining more and more extensive influence at both home and abroad.The cases analyzed in this translation report come from the Chinese-English translation for 2018 Looking China Youth Film Project.This project collects information such as news release,notes from international youth filmmakers,international supervisors,local coordinators,and film introductions to form a bilingual booklet for publication.The author of the report was responsible for the translation of about 10800 Chinese characters of this project.Based on this hands-on translation experience,in view of the knowledge and application of translation theories,the author has examined the strategies for translation and found that due to the obvious differences between Chinese and English,there is not always correspondence at the lexical level during translation.In most cases,there are shifts in the translation compared to the source text.In 1956,based on Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics,the translation theorist Catford first proposed the concept of “translation shifts”.He discussed translation shifts within the sentence domain,divided translation shifts into level shifts and category shifts,and established a translation shifts analysis model.In order to expand the model beyond the sentence domain,the author of this report integrates the translation shifts studies of Catford,Zoubi and Hassnawi to classify and analyze the examples in the translation.In this project,the shifts occurring in translation can be divided into two categories: within a sentence and beyond a sentence.The shifts within a sentence mainly include level shifts,structure shifts,class shifts,and unit shifts,while shifts beyond a sentence are reflected in semantic shifts,textual shifts,and rhetorical shifts.The translation practice has proved that under the guidance of the translation shifts model,the translator should use translation strategies flexibly in the context of the source language and the target language.The report starts with the introduction to the translation project,then emphasizes its significance,and clarifies the main structures of the report.In chapter two,the author reviews the process of pre-translation,while-translation and post-translation of the translation project.Next,by combining the “translation shifts” theory,the author integrated the translation shifts model and used the model for case analysis;the end of the report is a summary of the experience of this translation project.Here,the author hopes that the report can provide some cases or ideas for the study of translation shifts in the future,and it can also be helpful to the promotion of the Looking China project and cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries.