A Report On The Translation Of How Much Of These Hills Is Gold(Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Translation Shifts

This report is based on my translation of the excerpts of How Much of These Hills is Gold,a story which is authored by C.Pam.Zhang,a Beijing-born Chinese American writer and which is shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020.As Chinese American literature is an important component of American minority literature,in the short story,the writer also tries to establish a cultural identity that is acceptable for both Chinese traditional culture and American white culture.It is therefore of high literary value.The writer applies a lot of dialogues and descriptions of action to the short story in order to integrate sexism,racial discrimination and other issues into the stories of a Chinese family in the gold rush.Based on Catford’s theory of translation shifts,this report makes a detailed analysis of the first two chapters of How Much of These Hills is Gold,and get the hang of the difficult process of establishing a cultural identity of the Chinese American Writer.On this basis,appropriate translation techniques are adopted to strive for reproducing the style of the source text.More specifically,Catford’s level shifts and category shifts are employed in this report to analyze the translation of the source text.In terms of the level shifts,it refers to what is expressed in the source text through grammatical devices can be re-expressed in the target text by lexical means,and vice versa.With respect to category shifts,such subdivisions as structural shifts,class shifts and unit shifts are made use of to account for specific translation cases.It is hoped that this report and my translation,for all all their limitations and defects,will prove to be of some reference value to those involved in the field of translation.