A Report On The E-C Translation Of Chapter Ⅰ,Little Novels By Wilkie Collins Under The Guidance Of Catford’s Shift Theory

This report is a translation practice report on the E-C translation of the first story in Little Novels by Wilkie Collins.This narrative story describes the return of a disembodied spirit to earth,and leads the reader on new and strange ground.Little Novels is composed of 14 short stories.Various retrievals show that there is no domestic Chinese translation of this novel available anywhere at present.Its translation may help translators learn about Wilkie Collins’ writing techniques and may also open up new horizons for Chinese readers who are fond of detective mysteries.Analyzing the stylistic and linguistic features of the source text has found that the source text belongs to expressive text as is stated by Newmark,so that Catford’s Shift Theory has been used to guide the translation practice and the writing of this report to express the author’s intention smoothly and maintain the stylistic and linguistic features a as well as information of the source text.In the translation,such translation methods as literal translation,free translation the like have been adopted to overcome the difficulties encountered,so that the translation achieves the expected effect.This translation practice report consists of four parts.The first part introduces the background,purpose and significance of this translation practice as well as the structure of this report.The second part describes the main elements of pre-translating,translating and post-translating.The third part analytically discusses the translation methods,translation strategies and their effects of typical cases with the help of Catford’s Shift Theory from the lexical,syntactic and discourse levels theoretically.The fourth part summarizes the translator’s gains from this translation practice and its report along with some preliminary ideas to make up for the shortcomings in existence.