A Report On E-C Translation Of International Handbook Of Elder Abuse And Mistreatment(Excerpts) Based On Translation Shifts Theory

With the accelerating process of China’s aging society,elder abuse is a crucial topic of concern for the whole society.It is important to translate academic papers related to solving the problem of elder abuse.As the laws and policies on elder abuse in European and American countries are relatively perfect,the translated materials for this report are selected from two papers United States Issues in Elder Abuse and Elder Abuse and Adult Safeguarding in UK in the proceedings of International Handbook of Elder Abuse and Mistreatment.The author hopes that this translated text will have a certain reference significance for the prevention and control of elder abuse in China.Academic papers are characterized of using many specialized vocabularies,a high frequency of passive voice sentences and compound sentences and frequent use of quotations.Based on Catford’s shifts theory,the author explores the translation methods and techniques of academic papers from English to Chinese.Translation shift theory aims at the departures from formal correspondence in the process of going from the source language to the target language,which mainly includes level shifts and category shifts,here category shifts include structural shifts,class shifts,unit shifts and intra-system shifts.The author addressed the difficulties in the translation process from the differences between the English and Chinese languages in vocabulary use,sentence structure and expression habits,analyzed the typical cases in the translation from the perspectives of class shifts,structure shifts,unit shifts,and level shifts.The author shifted the passive voice sentences into active voice sentences,decomposed long and compound sentences into parts,and the translation methods such as free translation and division are used.In order to increase the dynamic sense of the target language,some of the nouns,adjectives,and other parts of speech were shifted into verbs in Chinese.And the shift at the cultural level is realized and added.The author hopes that this paper can provide some support and basis for theoretical and practical research on English-Chinese translation of academic papers.