Translation Shifts From The Consideration Of Target Readers

This is a translation practice report based on translating Chapter 6 and Chapter 11 of The Super Age written by Bradley Schurman,the founder and CEO of The Super Age company.The source book expounds the most comprehensive understanding of population aging and the efforts that the society needs to make to cope with the problem,conveying important information about global population aging to readers.However,due to the differences in cultural backgrounds,language habits and language structures between China and foreign countries,absolute equivalence of some words and sentences cannot be achieved during the translation process.Besides,the source text language is highly specialized,making it more difficult to accurately and smoothly express the content of the source text simply by literal translation.After reading some literature and relevant materials and by considering the text type,the author ultimately adopts different translation shift methods to improve the quality of the translation.Moreover,due to the wide audience of the target text,the translator tries to approach target readers as much as possible on the premise of following the fidelity of the translation by adopting two main shift methods: part of speech shifts and sentence structure shifts,and maximize the value of the translation with highly readable language.Among them,shifts of nouns,adjectives and adverbs are commonly used methods of part of speech shifts.By shifting the part of speech of a word,the translation is rendered closer to the language habits of the target readers.Also,shifts of sentence order,sentence components and sentence voice can also effectively improve the readability of the translation.In addition,the translator combines literal translation and free translation methods to maintain the faithfulness,fluency,and coherence of the translation.In the writing of the translation practice report,the author selected typical cases for analysis,and further emphasized the important application value of translation shifts for improving the readability of the target text.In summary,this report not only analyzes and demonstrates the value and feasibility of the shifts strategy in specific translation practices,but also expounds the important role of reader response in influencing translators’ decision-making and improving the quality of translations.It is hoped that this report can provide useful references for translation practitioners in relevant fields.