A Report On The Translation Of Golden Fetters:The Gold Standard And The Great Depression,1919-1939(Chapter One)

With the advancement of the globalization and the improvement of living standard, a growing number of people become interested in economics, starting to focus on economic situations and keep with economic trends. As a result, books about economic theories and events are becoming best sellers. In some of these books, economists pay much attention to the analysis of significant economic events in history and try to learn from them, thus providing suggestions to decision- makers and promoting the development of the society. Providing references and guidance to decision- makers in C hina, the translation of such books would have positive impacts on China's economy, preventing catastrophes like the Great Depression from happening again.This paper is a report on a translation project of the book Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939 sponsored by China Machine Press. The source text in this report is the first chapter of the book, in which the overall backgrounds, basic concepts and the contents of other chapters are illustrated briefly, making it easier for readers to understand the general idea of this book. Moreover, the language characteristics of the first chapter are noteworthy and typical, representing the language style of the whole book. As a result, the translator chooses this chapter as the material of the translation practice, analyzing and summarizing the difficulties and translation strategies in the practice.Under the guidance of Catford's theory of translation shifts, the paper discusses the English-Chinese translation of economic texts. During the translation process, the translator has come across some typical translation difficulties at word level, grammatical level and sentence level. After categorizing and analyzing these problems in detail, the translator has summarized some translation strategies using level shifts, structural shifts and class shifts, thus solving the problems and improving the readability on the premise of fidelity. To be specific, at word level, the translator adopts class shifts to change the class of some words, making the sentences more fluent and readable in C hinese; at grammatical level, the translator translates the tense, subjunctive mood and plural words in the source text into Chinese words by reference to level shifts, thus restoring the information hidden in these grammatical phenomena through proper amplification; at sentence level, the translator reconstructs the structures of some sentences according to structural shifts, so as to enhance the logic and readability of the source text.