A Report On The E-C Translation Of History From Things（Excerpt） Under The Guidance Of Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory

Material culture studies is a research field that has emerged in the West during the past several decades.Its core is to explore the cultural values of a particular society in a given time by observing human-made objects.Based on the translation of the first four essays in the book History from Things,which collects eighteen essays on material culture studies,this report analyzes its language features and explores the translation methods under the guidance of Catford’s translation shifts theory.The language feature of this text is distinctive.At the lexical level,there are a large number of nominalized words.From the syntactic perspective,passive voice is frequently used and the sentence structure is relatively complicated.As for the language style,since the cultural issue it discusses is closely related to the life of ordinary people,the words it uses and its content are relatively easy to understand.Therefore,during the translation process,not only the accurate expression of the meaning of the source text but also the readability of the target text should be guaranteed.In order to achieve this goal,the translator has to solve the problem of formal incorrespondence between the SL and TL.Based on Catford’s translation shifts theory,this report discusses the way to overcome such difficulty from the perspectives of level shifts and category shifts.First of all,level shifts are applied to the translation of English tenses and plural forms.The author uses lexical devices in Chinese to reproduce the meaning conveyed by English grammar.Category shifts are further divided into structure shifts,class shifts,unit shifts and intra-system shifts.In terms of structure shift,the author shifts the passive voice and post-positive attributives in English into the active voice and pre-positive attributives in Chinese.In terms of class shifts,the author changes some English nouns and adjectives which convey meanings of actions into verbs in Chinese and also changes some English verbs into Chinese nouns according to specific context.In terms of unit shits,the author changes the words,word groups and clauses in English into word groups,clauses,and sentences in English respectively.With the help of translation shifts theory,the target text becomes more smooth and fluent in writing and clearer in meaning.Through this report,the author explores the application of Catford’s translation shifts theory into academic translation.On the one hand,the author hopes that the translated text can attract more Chinese readers to understand material culture studies.On the other hand,the author also hopes that this report can provide a reference for those who are working to translate the academic text.