Strategies For Verbalization In Social Science Translation Under The Guidance Of Translation Shifts Theory

Eleven chapters,from Chapter Two to Twelve of the book Strategic Thinking Skills,are selected as the original text for translation practice which this report is based on.Strategic Thinking Skills mainly explains the outstanding strategies in history proposed by some famous thinkers,strategists,statesmen,commanders and generals.With these strategies,they governed their countries and won the battles,and thus they not only expanded their territories,but also protected their motherlands.After introducing those strategies,the author of this book tries to apply these outstanding strategies in today’s social life,such as business operation,company management and other aspects.He gives some typical examples to prove his thought and hopes to enlighten readers to find a better way in their routine working.Therefore,it is of great significance to translate this book.Based on Catford’s translation shifts theory,this translation practice report aims to study the verbalization strategy which can be probably used in the Chinese-English translation of social science texts.According to Catford,translation shifts can be divided into two types: level shifts and category shifts,and category shifts can be further divided into structure shifts,class shifts,unit shifts and intra-system shifts.The verbalization strategy studied in this report belongs to class shifts.As a common phenomenon in English-Chinese translation,class shifts shouldn’t be ignored.After learning relevant theories and materials on translation shifts and sorting out the sentences in which the verbalization strategy is applied,the author divides the strategy into the verbalization of nouns,the verbalization of adverbs,the verbalization of adjectives and the verbalization of prepositions.This translation practice report compared English and Chinese which reveals the differences between the two languages in terms of structure and grammar.Generally speaking,the nouns in English are more frequently used while in Chinese the verbs are prominent.Thus,English is usually nominalized while Chinese is more verbalized,which serves as the theoretical basis for the verbalization strategy used in English-Chinese translation.According to the specific situations encountered in this translation practice text,the author flexibly selects and uses appropriate verbalization strategies to convey the information of the original text as accurately as possible to ensure that the translation is fluent and idiomatic and ultimately improves the quality of the translation.