A Study On The C-E Translation Strategies Of The White Paper Democratic Reform In Tibet—Sixty Years On From The Perspective Of Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory

Since the reform and opening up,China’s economic development and comprehensive national strength have improved significantly.At present,China has an increasing influence over the world.In order to better carry out its political,economic and cultural exchanges with other nations,show China’s development to the outside word and eliminate some nations’ unnecessary misunderstandings on China,translation has become an extremely integral means of communication.Thus,it is urgent to find effective translation principles and strategies as well as more targeted translation theories to guide political text translation.This study takes Catford’s translation shifts theory as the theoretical foundation to analyze the Chinese government white paper Democratic Reform in Tibet—Sixty Years On and its English version.On the foundation of the stylistic features of political text,this thesis adopts quantitative and qualitative research approaches to the study of related corpora from both micro and macro perspectives.In view of the huge diversities between Chinese and English,this exploration finds: 1)Catford’s translation shifts theory underlines textual equivalence rather than formal correspondence and focuses on translation shift at the micro-level.Therefore,it can better guide and analyze the text at lexical and syntactic levels.2)By a comparative analysis of the selected white paper and its English version,the paper discovers that in its C-E translation,level shift,structure shift and unit shift are more frequently employed than other types of shift.3)In view of the huge distinctions between English and Chinese,in order to avoid translationese and translation errors,it is essential for translators to offer a full interpretation of some expressions with Chinese characteristics in this type of text to accurately convey their meanings.4)Because political text emphasizes faithfulness to the original,and Catford’s translation shifts theory foregrounds semantic equivalence,through translation shift,translators can not only convey the exact original information but be in line with the target language readers’ expression habits.With the assistance of Catford’s translation shifts theory,this thesis studies the C-E translation strategies of the selected Chinese government white paper,which proves the effectiveness of this theory in guiding the C-E translation of such political text.Besides,it aims to enrich domestic translation research on the Chinese government white papers,provide some guidance for further study on the relevant translation and offer a reference for beginners of English translation major.