A Report Of The E-C Translation Of Chinese Astrology:Early Chinese Occultism(Excerpt) From The Perspective Of Casford’s Translation Shifts Theory

This report is excerpted from the last two chapters of American sinologist Paul Carus’ s Chinese Astrology: Early Chinese Occultism.This book is the historical and cultural text,which contains a large number of elements about the zodiacs in ancient Babylon and Confucian thought and culture in China,and has a large number of long and complex sentences and cultural-loaded words,which is full of historical and cultural characteristics.To translate such texts requires an understanding of the historical and cultural connotations behind them,including ancient Babylonian history and Chinese Confucian thought and culture,and also needs the ability of accurately translating the cultural-loaded words and related historical and cultural terms,and the ability to perform bilingual transformation of long and complex sentences with complex grammar and structure,all of which have high translation requirements.The Western scholar Catford put forward the Translation Shifts Theory and defined the concept of "shift" for the first time,believing that there will be "translation shifts" in the translators’ translation,that is,"deviating from the formal correspondence in the process from the source language to the target language".He divided it into level shift and category shift,and the latter includes structure shift,class shift,unit shift and intra-system shift.The Translation Shifts Theory provides theoretical support for the translation of historical and cultural texts,and analyzing such texts from four dimensions is conducive to improving the local acceptance of them.Based on Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory and combined with analysis of specific translation examples in translation practice,this practice report studies the characteristics and translation effects of the target text from four aspects: structure shift,class shift,unit shift and intra-system shift of the category shift.The report is divided into five parts: the first chapter introduces the source text and its author as well as the background and significance of the translation report;chapter two introduces Translation Shifts Theory and reviews its researches at home and abroad;chapter three explains the specific process of translation in three stages:pre-translation,in-translation and post-translation;chapter four analyzes the specific examples of translation from four aspects: structure shift,class shift,unit shift and intra-system shift;chapter five states the limitation and reflections,summarizing translation experience in order to provide references for the translation of historical and cultural texts in the future.