Shifts In English To Chinese Translation Of Clause In Technical Handbooks

Translation is an extremely complex mental activity,which plays an important role in promoting the progress of human civilization.In the 21st century,science and technology has seen tremendous development and the translation of scientific text has been playing an ever-growing role.In a sense,translation involves a variety of shifts between two languages and the translator’s natural or intentional choices in the process of translation.Adopting Systemic Functional Linguistics as its theoretical framework,supplemented by Catford’s theory of translation shift,this thesis makes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Chinese translation of a selected practical English technical handbook,in order to explore:(1)the Chinese translation shifts of clause complexes,clause simplexes and embedded clauses in the process,and(2)the underlying factors of specific shifts.The analysis shows that due to the similarity between English and Chinese,translation choices in the Chinese translation of technical texts is to basically maintain the structural form of the original text without translation shifts.In addition,due to the differences between English and Chinese,especially in the domain of logico-semantic relationship,the hypotactic relationship in English is often translated into paratactic relationship and the more complex logical relationship is translated into a simpler logical relationship.Text analysis also shows various shifts in the translation of embedded clauses.This paper attempts to explain the reasons for such choices from the perspective of typological differences,context,and translator preferences.This thesis adopts a linguistic point of view to address issues in the translation of technical handbooks.The findings contribute to the improvement of the quality of translation and translation teaching.The thesis also exemplifies a way of using Systemic Functional Linguistics in the study of technical translation.