On The Chinese Translation Of English Prepositional Phrases In Airport Technology Research Plan

This translation report is based on the author's translation of the first part of Airport Technology Research Plan on the official website of Federal Aviation Administration. The original text is rather typical of Civil Aviation English, and one of its features is the high frequent employment of prepositional phrases, which, to some extent, causes certain problems for the understanding and translation of the text. After reviewing the previous research on the Chinese translation of English prepositions and prepositional phrases, the author proceeds to analyze the subject from the perspective of Catford's class shifts and unit shifts. This study intends to find out the translation patterns of shifts in the Chinese translation of prepositional phrases in the selected text.There are 1141 effective English prepositional phrases. Class shifts will be discussed in three cases as English prepositions into Chinese verbs, conjunctions and prepositions, and unit shifts in three cases as English prepositional phrases upgrading into Chinese sentences,degrading to Chinese words and remaining Chinese phrases. In order to make an accurate comparison, translation shifts of prepositional phrases are marked out in both the source text and target text. It is found that the English prepositions are often shifted to Chinese verbs,conjunctions and prepositions, and with regard to the English prepositional phrases, about 73%of them still remain to be Chinese prepositional phrases after translation, around 16% of them are degraded to the scale of words and 11% more or less are upgraded to the scale of sentences. In short, in the process of Chinese translation most English prepositional phrases have maintained their original unit, remaining to be phrases.