A Translation Report Of The Oxford History Of The American People(excerpts) From The Perspective Of Translation Shifts Theory

The original text of this translation report is selected from Chapter four and Chapter five of The Oxford History of the American People,written by Samuel Eliot Morison,an American historian famed maritime history.These sections make a specific introduction to European countries,which established American colonies in the 17^th century raging from Virginia colony,Plymouth Plantation,New Netherland colony to New France colony.And the source text mainly focuses on historical text with relatively formal and rigorous language features,which contains all sorts of proper nouns with plentiful cultural background information so as to deliver the readability and reality of American colonial history.The purpose of this translation report is to find out and solve problems in the translating process guided by translation shifts theory for the sake of summarizing textual features and translating methods towards historical text.In this way,it can facilitate the understanding of colonial information to achieve an accurate and concise translation.Due to the difference in translation methods between historical text and non-literary text,translating difficulties mainly embodied in three parts:the complex sentence structure covering translation of passive voices and attributive clauses;the shortage of relevant background information about American history which leads to limitations in reading and rendering;and ambiguous discourse structures which have difficulties in illustrating logical relations and meanings of sentence elements.Thserefore,the translator combines shifts model proposed by Catford,Al-Zoubi and Al-Hassinawi to analyze cases in terms of structural shifts,class shifts,unit shifts as well as other shifts involving semantic and textual shifts from the perspective of translation shifts theory.Through the further case study,it is beneficial to the application of translation shifts theory and reproduction of high-quality translation.Hence,it can be gained that translation strategies of historical text should not totally depend on methods but highlight the supplement of cultural backgrounds of orignal text.On account of semantic and textual component to maintain the logic of source text,the translator believes that translation shifts theory is an effective way to work out problems encountered in the process of translation practice.