A Report On The Translation Of Management Texts

The content of this translation report is derived from a real translation project.The translation project is the translation of procedure documents,which are drawn up by Beijing Boomwave Test Service Co.,Ltd.for its Product Testing Laboratory to be accredited for the competence of testing and calibration laboratory.Guided by level shifts and category shifts in Catford’s translation shifts theory,the report analyzes translation methods of management texts by using the translation of procedure documents as an example.Catford’s translation shifts theory focuses on the translation practice at the micro level,and elaborates on level shifts and category shifts at every unit with clear classification and reasonable structure.Procedure documents are requirements and regulations for the activities of the quality system,and their contents are expressed in the form of sentences at the micro level.So Catford’s translation shifts theory has guiding significance for this translation practice.Through the analysis of differences between the source language and the target language,the report mainly discusses specific shifts between Chinese and English in grammar,lexis and context with the guidance of the translation shifts theory.Based on level shifts,the author analyzes cases at the lexical level and the grammatical level.Guided by category shifts,the author discusses lexical and syntactic shifts in cases from aspects of structure shifts,class shifts,unit shifts and intra-system shifts.Although Catford’s translation shifts theory fails to involve the macro level of translation,it still can help translators solve translation problems including different forms of tenses,parts of speech,singular and plural forms,differences of sentence structures,and technical terms and non-technical terms,which are caused by differences between two languages in the translation process.