A Report On The English Translation Of Online Learning And Development (Part One) From The Perspective Of Translation Shifts Theory

In the middle and late 20 th century,with the wide application of computer technology and network communication technology in distance education,online-learning,a new form of distance learning,has been developing rapidly.Online Learning and Development,a monograph in Chinese by Zhong Keding from Beijing Normal University,integrates some of the theoretical and practical research results accumulated and produced over the past decade or so to explore issues in the field of online-learning.The research focuses on the essential characteristics of online-learning environment,learning activities,learning materials and its influence on learners.Through the research and analysis of the translation materials,the translator finds that the language of the source text is very formal,with prominent grammatical phenomena such as verbs and complex sentences.The translation material is extracted from Chapter 1,“Characteristics of Online-Learning Environment”and Chapter 2,“Characteristics of Online-Learning Activities” with a total of about 33,000 Chinese characters.Guided by Catford’s translation shifts theory,this report successfully solves some problems in translation practice.The theory includes level shifts and category shifts.Category shifts are further divided into structure shifts,class shifts,unit shifts and intra-system shifts.Under the guidance of level shifts,the translator mainly shifts tenses and aspects so that the translation tenses match the time when the teaching activity or phenomenon occurs in the source text.In the aspect of structure shifts,the translator adjusts the sentence structures according to the semantics to grasp the accurate expression of the target language.In the class shifts,the translator carries out the parts of speech shifts according to the different characteristics of Chinese and English lexis to make the translation smooth and easy to understand.In the unit shifts,the translator shifts several Chinese short sentences into compound sentences to make the translation more in line with the reading habits of the target readers.And in terms of intra-system shifts,the translator does not keep word-for-word translation for the original terms,but finds the most authentic and correct version in the target language system to replace the original words.Through this practice,the translator finds that Catford’s translation shifts theory is adaptable,instructive and operable in the Chinese-English translation on educational texts,which can,to some extent,provide a new perspective for other scholars to conduct academic educational translation research.The translator also hopes that this report can provide some reference for future research on translation of educational texts,and make a little contribution to improving the quality of translation of academic texts.