Part-of-speech Conversion In The Translation Of A SocialScience Text

This practice report is based on the translation of the first and second chapter of the book Linguistic Justice: International Law and Language Policy.It is a social science work about the global dominance of English under the influence of globalization,while at the same time,some minor languages are “disappearing” and language issues are becoming a source of racial tensions.The book explores how international law can contribute to language justice,in which Pierre’s methodology is adopted with the concepts of “habitus” and “field” to help understand the meaning,and reveals the limits of international law in the field of language.Language is closely related to our lives,and thus this related research is of great significance to social development.The translation of this book is important because it is a vehicle to disseminate its research results to the general public.The source text for this practice report is selected from Linguistic Justice: International Law and Language Policy and Catford’s translation shift theory is adopted to guide social science translation.The report focuses on English-Chinese lexical conversion strategies in social science translation and aims to improve the quality of this translation practice with the help of Catford’s shift theory.In 1965,Catford put forward the “shift theory”,in which he believed that the essence of translation is a kind of language conversion,and divided translation shifts into two categories:level shift and category shift,aiming at achieving translation equivalence between ST and TT.This report consists of five chapters.The first chapter introduces the main contents of the source text,and discusses the significance of this translation practice.The second chapter describes the process of translation practice.The third chapter is the theoretical framework,in which Catford’s shift theory is explained and class shifts are analyzed in detail.The fourth chapter combines translation examples and Catford’s shift theory,and explores the methods applicable in social science translation.These methods,such as conversion of nouns,adjectives,adverbs and verbs are exemplified in the report.The last part is a conclusion,in which the gains and shortcomings of this translation practice are concluded.