| Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma was written by Wen-Chin Chang and published by Cornell University Press in 2014.Through a personal narrative approach,this book,as an important ethnography,focuses on the migration history and transnational trading experiences of Yunnanese Chinese migrants who lived in Burma.It presents great academic achievements through life stories intertwined with macro social background.This book regards Yunnan as a starting point and conducts research among the Yunnanese who have basically undertaken migration from Yunnan to Southeast Asia by land,which breaks through previous studies on migrants who moved from Guangzhou and Fujian to Southeast Asia by sea.In the process,these Yunnanese migrants traverse social status,class,region and gender through movement while crossing geographical borders.The translator chose the seventh chapter and the epilogue for translation,which mainly explore the transnational jade trade dominated by migrant Yunnanese since the1960 s.The vivid language and special expressions offer a flexible means to present subjective descriptions and academic accounts.In addition,the frequent use of nouns,passive sentences and complex sentences is not uncommon.With the guidance of Catford’s translation shifts theory,this translation project specifically summarizes and describes the changes that occur during the shifts of the two languages at the lexical and syntactic levels from the perspective of level shifts and category shifts.It is found that translation shifts theory can effectively guide the translation of anthropological texts,reduce the differences existing between the source language and the target language,and improve the readability of the target text.This translation report aims to help readers to know about studies of borderland and diaspora,and provide beneficial reference on the translation practice of ethnography. |
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