A Report On E-C Translation Under The Guidance Of Translation Shifts Theory: A Case Study Of Military Strategy: A Global History (Excerpts)

In this report on the translation practice of a historical and informative book Military Strategy: A Global History,the translator analyzes the specific cases in the process of translation and tries to explore how to achieve the equivalence between the original and the translation by settling the difficulties encountered in the specific context.Based on the linguistic features of the source material and the distinctions between English and Chinese,the translator finds that Catford’s translation shifts theory has high feasibility in this translation practice.Level shifts in the theory are used to transform plural forms and tense in the original text into Chinese lexis;with regard to passives,postpositive attributives and compound sentences at the syntactic level,structure shifts and unit shifts under category shifts are applied to convert them into more concise and clear forms;in addition,class shifts are used to deal with nominalization at the lexical level;and as for the difficulty of choosing the words that do not correspond to the original text,intra-system shifts are applied to solve it.Through the use of different translation strategies,the translator has reproduced the same effect of the original in the translation to a certain extent and has authenticated that the translation shifts theory can guide the translator’s translation practice.However,there are still some defects in this report,and some details need to be further improved in the future due to the limited proficiency of the translator.