A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of United Nations World Water Development Report 2022 (Excerpts)

This English-Chinese translation report is selected from United Nations World Water Development Report 2022 issued by UNESCO.Its theme is "Groundwater-Making the Invisible Visible".This practice report focuses on the translation of legal and other mechanisms of groundwater governance(Chapter 2),and groundwater and agriculture(Chapter 3)as the objects of case analysis.This translation practice is guided by Catford’s Translation Shifts.The translator mainly uses category shift as the translation strategy to present the content and form of the original text objectively and accurately.Differences in parts of speech,the inconsistency in grammatical structures,the inequality in language units and semantic inequality between English and Chinese are the main difficulties that the translator encountered in this translation process.This practice report focuses on the selection of category shift theory as a solution to solve the above problems through class-shift,structure-shift,unit-shift and intra-system-shift.In the process of translation,different shifts,such as nouns converted into verbs,passive voice into active voice,and sentences into meaning groups were used to ensure the accuracy and smoothness based on good understanding and logical analysis of the original text.The practice report shows that the theory of category shift has guiding significance for the translation of sci-tech texts.The practice report is divided into five parts.The first chapter is a brief introduction of the translation project,mainly including the project background,project description and the significance of translation practice.The second chapter describes the translation procedure,involving the preparation before translation,the translation progress and post-translation revision.The third chapter is an overview of translation shifts theory of Catford with the focus on the theory of category shift.Chapter Four is the application of category shift theory,which is the key part of this report,through specific case analysis.Chapter Five is the conclusion,summarizing the achievements and shortcomings of this translation practice,and pointing out the direction for future efforts.