A Practice Report On The E-C Translation Of BBC History(Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Translation Shifts Theory

BBC History is the UK’s best-selling history magazine,specializing in articles relating to British and world history and aiming to reveal a new face of the past to help readers better understand the world today by reading the latest,most thought-provoking historical research.According to Reiss’ text typology theory,BBC History can be classified as an informative historical text.This kind of text aims to convey historical information,characters’ thoughts and authors’ views to readers.Each passage has a distinct theme expressed by logical language,and its text structure focuses on the semantic and syntactic level with the content involving a large number of proprietary words and relatively complex sentence structure.In order to solve these translation difficulties,Catford’s translation shifts theory provides theoretical basis and guidance for the translation practice.Based on the translation of BBC History,this report explores the translation of historical texts under the guidance of Catford’s translation shifts theory.In recent years,Catford’s translation theories have attracted more and more attention from scholars at home and abroad.The concept of “shift” involved in his translation theory is the most basic method in translation practice.This scientific theory is widely applied to various types of translation such as politics,humanity,economy,science,history and literature,news,law,film and television subtitling and so on.It’s seen that this scientific theory offers the specific and profound guidance for our translation practice.Under the guidance of translation shifts theory,the author analyzes the linguistic differences between the source language and the target language from the perspectives of level shift,structure shift,category shift,unit shift and intra-system shift.By combining the context,the author flexibly adopts the translation strategies of literal translation and free translation,foreignization and domestication,semantic translation and communicative translation,as well as the translation techniques of inversion,omission,amplification,negation,division,voice transformation and so on.Under the guidance of translation shifts theory,the author hopes that the translation can accurately convey the original information with coherent writing,appropriate language,objective and scientific discussion,as well as the translated text is faithful to the original style,so as to help readers have a comprehensive understanding of historical documents,historical events and provide new ideas for scholars studying historical text translation.