On The Strategies Of E-C Translation From The Perspective Of Cognitive Category Shifts

As researchers make deeper study into cognitive linguistics, they attach moreimportance to applying cognitive theories to researching on other academic areas.Categorization, as a vital part in cognitive science, has been highly concerned all thetime, and category shifts become the hot subject of study gradually. It is a short timeto study category shifts, so there isn’t a concrete concept of category shifts. It is rareto apply category shifts to study translation. For making up for this deficiency, thisthesis tries to probe the translating strategies in E-C translation.The thesis will deal with three phenomena of category shifts in E-C translationfrom the perspective of cognitive category. The thesis lists the main cases of the threephenomena of category shifts, and analyzes the relative translation strategies in E-Ctranslation. The three phenomena of category shifts studied in the thesis arerecategorization of word classes, in-category shifts and category shifts of syntax. Theobject of study is Chinese versions of The Diary of a Nobody. The Diary of a Nobodyis the diary of a small staff, Pooter, and it is a fictive work. Although the novel doesn’thold a vital position in the orthodox literature, it suits both refined and popular tastes.This thesis chooses two Chinese versions of this humorous novel as the researchobject. They are Sun Zhongxu’s and Yang Yanbin’s versions. On the basis of the threephenomena of category shifts, the thesis compares and analyzes some examples takenfrom the two versions. And then, it sums up some relative translation strategies andevaluates the translation quality of two Chinese versions.After studying the research, it comes to the following conclusions. First, in orderto properly handle the differences between English and Chinese vocabulary,translators will shift the word category (that is, recategorization of word classes) intranslating. Those category shifts mainly include the noun-to-verb recategorization,the adjective-to-verb recategorization and the preposition-to-verb recategorization.Second, on the basis of different lexical categories and Langacker’s scanning formula,the thesis puts forward three translation strategies: category decline, categorypromotion and category transformation. Third, through the comparison of the twoversions of The Diary of a Nobody, translators will adopt three translation strategies in the aspect of syntax shifts: long-to-short sentence shifts, passive-to-active sentenceshifts and impersonal-personal sentence shifts. Fourth, according to the threephenomena of category shifts and relative translation strategies, the thesis comparesSun Zhongxu’s and Yang Yanbin’s versions to find the better one.