A Case Study On The Translation Of The Weather Machine:A Journey Inside The Forecast Under The Guidance Of Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory

The recent decades have seen intensive extreme weather events as a result of the accelerating climate change.The severe loss of life and property damage have made people aware of the significance and urgency of enhancing weather forecasting and monitoring capabilities.Although most people are accustomed to checking the weather forecast every day,few of them ever know how it works and what its massive observation system is really like.In order to improve this situation,the book entitled The Weather Machine:A Journey Inside the Forecast by Andrew Blum is chosen for this report.This book vividly describes Andrew Blum’s journey inside the forecasting systems.The writer of this report believes that the translation of this book would help the general public better understand the weather forecasting system and the necessity of improving national weather forecasting capability.As a popular science book,The Weather Machine is highly readable,but it still includes a number of long and complex sentences and technical terms,which have created difficulties in translation.This report adopts a case study and analyzes the problems that the writer of this report encounters in translating the third chapter of The Weather Machine:A Journey Inside the Forecast.In this process,Catford’s translation shifts theory has been widely used in handling the linguistic differences between English and Chinese and achieving textual equivalence.Based on the analysis of over twenty cases chosen from the excerpt,the writer concludes that three kinds of translation shifts may occur most frequently in English-Chinese translation,namely structure shifts,unit shifts,and class shifts.Structure shifts can be made to deal with the differences in the syntactic structure and the logical sequence of ideas between the two languages.Unit shifts,especially the upward unit shifts,are usually used to divide the long-winded English sentences into several interconnected Chinese clauses and thus add to readability to the target text.And since verbs are used more frequently than nouns in Chinese,class shifts can be used to replace nouns and nominalized constructions in English sentences with verbs during the translation process.