A Report On E-C Translation Of The Excerpts From Freshwater Challenges Of South Africa And Its Upper Vaal River

The material translated is from Freshwater Challenges of South Africa and its Upper River.Its main content is about the issues related with water in South Africa.Problems on freshwater of South Africa remain serious and,to some extent,have a negative impact on the country’s economic development.What’s more,the problems on freshwater are related to people around the world and it is human’s common mission to protect water.Therefore,the research about translation of the material is of considerable significance.The original text is a popular science book.How to make translation convey accurately and completely the original information,meet reading habits of target language readers,fluently express original content and be easily understood are the major problems a translator should think of.There exist their own characteristics in Chinese and English,so translators need to know the differences and adopt the method of “shifts” in a suitable way to avoid unclear and incorrect translation.The report analyses the differences between English and Chinese in detail,characteristics of the original text,and the practice by cases from level shifts and category shifts in the guidance of Catford’s theory of translation shifts.Level shifts are applied on tenses,passive voice and plural nouns,and category shifts on sentence structures,word classes and units.Translation can be more fluent and accords with expression of Chinese by “shifts” to break forms of the original text.The report elaborates “shifts” that are applied in the practice mainly from the aspect of linguistics and provides some reference for translating of this kind of material.