A Report On The E-C Translation Of Will Productivity And Growth Return After The COVID-19 Crisis? (Excerpt) Under The Guidance Of Category Shift Theory

COVID-19 pandemic has brought huge shocks to world economy and seriously affected people’s social life.Revitalizing economy and returning to normal social life has become a common aspiration of people all over the world.The monograph “Will productivity and growth return after the COVID-19 crisis?” mainly investigates and analyzes this phenomenon.The translation material of this report is selected from the first and second chapter of this monograph: The great uncertainty and Bold action—by some firms.It aims to provide some guidance for countries in the post-pandemic era to revive their economies and restore normal social life.The analysis of economic phenomena in this monograph can also provide some ideas for China’s economic recovery and development.This text belongs to economic text.The key point of such text translation is accuracy and readability.Based on this,the author has encountered three types of translation difficulties in this practice: differences in sentence structures,differences in part of speech preferences and non-equivalence in linguistic units.In view of these three types of difficulties,the author employs structure shifts,class shifts and unit shifts guided by Catford’s Category Shift Theory.Firstly,in view of the differences in sentence structures,the author uses structure shifts to shift the passive sentences,post-attributive sentences and non-personal subject sentences into active sentences,pre-attributive sentences and personal subject sentences that are in line with Chinese expression habits.Secondly,in terms of the part of speech preference differences,class shifts are used to shift nouns,adjectives and prepositions with verb meanings in the source text into verbs,so as to shift the static language into dynamic language.Finally,in view of the linguistic unit non-equivalence,unit shifts are used to shift some adverbs at the beginning of sentences into phrases,some participle phrases into sentences,and long sentences into sentence groups.This report proposes that the Category Shift Theory has a strong guiding role in the economic text English-Chinese translation.Reasonable category shifts of the source text can make the translation convey the source text information more accurately and smoothly,which is in line with the reading habits of the target language readers,and also improves translation quality.The translation methods under the guidance of Category Shift Theory summarized in this report can provide some references and help for economic text translation in the future.