| This is a practice report on the translation of Betrayal: the Final Act of the Trump Show,a biography of Donald Trump by Jonathan Karl,who was the chief White House correspondent and chief Washington correspondent for ABC News.The book gives us an overview of how Donald Trump was doing against the background of COVID-19 in the final year of his presidency.Jonathan Karl has an objective,plain and concise writing style as he documented meetings and conferences inside the White House as well as introduced the background events like presidential election and impeachment trial.Translation of this book renders Chinese readers a glimpse into the political story behind-the-scenes of America,thus contributing to a more vivid and comprehensive understanding of American politics.With its record of real events and meetings as well as the literary function of biography,the book is characterized by its combination of informative texts and expressive texts.To better translate the book with varied text types,the translator should adopt a widely-applicable translation theory to achieve equivalent and finest translation at the meaning level.Guided by the translation shift theory of Catford,a commonly-used linguistic view on translation,the translator adopted level shifts and category shifts to explain translation practice examples in the excerpts.In level shifts,the transformation between grammar and lexis is discussed.Category shifts however are analyzed from three aspects,namely structure-shift,class-shift and unit-shift.The translator hopes to achieve “textual equivalence” in the combination of theory and practice,and provide translators some insight into the translation of biographical texts under the guidance of shifts theory. |
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