A Report On The Translation Of Why Travel?Understanding Our Need To Move And How It Shapes Our Lives(Chapters 3,4)

The paper is a report on a translation project.The source text is from the book Why Travel: Understanding Our Need to Move and How It Shapes Our Lives.It was jointly written by several authors and mainly discusses the nature and motivation of travel and how to travel better.Around this theme,experts and scholars from various fields like economics,sociology,evolutionary biology,anthropology,philosophy,technology,exploration,land use and other related subjects conduct an in-depth and detailed investigation on travel.The source text of this translation project is selected from this book’s third and fourth chapters which belong to the category of informative text.Under the theme of social science,the language of the source text is both rigorous and descriptive.The report discusses the feasibility of applying Catford’s translation shift to guide the translation of informative texts based on the source text’s types and linguistic features,starting from the translation difficulties involved in vocabulary,syntax and style.On this basis,for different translation difficulties,translator has applied methods such as structural shifts,class shifts,and unit shifts to solve them to achieve readability and accuracy of the translation as much as possible.This report holds that Catford’s translation shift has practical significance for translating texts of social science.