A Report On The E-C Translation Of Deceitful Media:Artificial Intelligence And Social Life After Turning Test(Excerpts)

J.C.Catford,a famous British linguist and translation theorist,first proposed the concept of "translation shift" in his book The Linguistic Theory of Translation(1965).He described and classified various shifts in the process of translation in detail based on the theory of general linguistics,which has certain significance for translation practice.In addition,the theory emphasizes equivalent meaning rather than formal correspondence.In the translation process,therefore,appropriate techniques of translation shifts can be chosen according to the differences between English and Chinese,and sentences can be broken and reorganized to retain the information of the source language as much as possible.The selected source text is a social science book titled Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after Turning Test.The author of this book mainly focuses on the “deception mechanism of artificial intelligence” and proposes the novel concept of "banal deception",aiming to urge people to handle human-computer interaction properly in case of being easily deceived by the emerging media.According to Reiss’ s text typology theory,the selected text belongs the informative text,focusing on the complete communication of information.Therefore,the translator chooses Catford’s translation shift theory as the theoretical basis for translation analysis.Combined with the level shifts and category shifts(including structure shifts,class shifts,unit shifts and intra-system shifts)proposed by the translation shift theory,the translator discusses the effect of various translation shifts on the translation skills like implementation,omission and adjustment of word order in the translation practice with specific cases.In addition,the features of the source text and difficulties confronted in terms of words,phrases and sentences are analyzed.The following findings are drawn:taking the English-Chinese differences as the starting point,the translation process of social science texts should choose appropriate translation skills based on applied translation shifts so as to express the information in ST as much as possible.