A Report On Chinese-English Translation Of Coating Products Manual From The Perspective Of Translation Shifts Theory

With the advent of economic globalization,the demand for scientific translation in import and export trade is increasing.As a supporting industry of the national economy,coating market maintains steady growth.Domestic coating brands are actively carrying out innovations and are committed to developing overseas markets.Based on this background,the translation of coating product manuals will boost global reputation and sales of Chinese brands.The Theory of Translation Shifts,first put forward by J.C.Catford in A Linguistic Theory of Translation published in 1965,defines certain changes in the translation process as translation shifts,which is further described as departures from formal correspondence in the process of going from the source language to the target language.Two major types of shifts include level shifts and category shifts.Level shifts embrace shifts from grammar or lexis and vice-versa,while category shifts can be analyzed in the order of structure-shifts,class-shifts,unit-shifts and instra-system-shifts.The theory of translation shifts provides a new approach to the study of translation theory.From the perspective of level shifts and category shifts(mainly from structureshifts,class-shifts and unit-shifts),this paper explores how to apply the theory of translation shifts to translating Chinese manual into English.Due to the strict grammar rules of scientific English,level shifts are intended to achieve grammar equivalence through inflection and changes of tense and aspect.Because of extensive use of imperative sentence and impersonal sentences in the source text,structure-shifts in category shifts are used to transform the sentence structure,making the translation version more logical.Class-shifts can be used to change part of speech of a word in view of the fact that the Chinese and English manuals have their own emphasis on vocabulary.Advertising function should be taken into consideration in manual translation,and therefore unitshifts can be used to enhance sentence coherence through shifts of units at different levels,such as phrases,clauses and sentences.In the translation process,flexible use of different shifts leads to better conformity to the target language convention and greatly improve sentence coherence.