A Report On The Translation Of A World On The Wing(Excerpts)

The source text of this translation report is selected from the second and third chapter of A World on The Wing by Scott Weidensaul.This section describes the researchers’ tracking and understanding of the migration behavior of migratory birds through methods such as tagging and the use of scientific instruments,and reveals the crisis of a sharp decline in migratory birds,some of which even become endangered due to habitat destruction and brutal hunting by hunters.At the same time,the author of this book also calls on readers to take concrete actions to protect birds by enhancing environmental awareness and strengthening scientific and technological innovation.The source text is an informative text,and it is a popular science text that introduces the knowledge of birds and focuses on cultivating readers’ awareness of environmental protection.It’s featured by rigorous description,technical terms,and a more formal language style that fully reflects the professionalism of the text.At the same time,the text contains more long and difficult sentences,and even some paragraphs consisting of one sentence.Non-predicate verbs are also widely used,and the grammatical structure is multi-layered,making the translation more difficult.The linguistic characteristics of the text require the translator to adopt shift skills during the process in order to make the target text more fluent and natural.Therefore,the translator chooses Catford’s translation shifts theory as the guidance to solve the translation problems encountered in this practice.Under the guidance of Catford’s translation shifts theory,on the basis of fully understanding the original text and reflecting the original text information,the translator has translated this part of the text by comparing the characteristics and structural differences between Chinese and English expressions.In the case analysis of this report,the translator uses level shifts,category shifts and cultural shifts to analyze and translate sentences containing non-predicate verbs,longer modifiers,culture-loaded words,and other compound sentences that reflect the language differences between Chinese and English in the original text.Adopting Catford’s translation shifts theory can break the rigidity of literal translation,thereby improving the logic and coherence of the translation.However,the weakness is that the shift theory can only guide the translation of words,phrases and sentences,but can barely touch on the cultural level.In view of the language characteristics and narrative mode of the text,the translator analyzes the culture-loaded words in the source text from the perspective of cultural shifts,thus making a supplement.