A Report On E-C Translation Of The 1619 Project:A New Origin Story(Chapter 18)

The text selected for this translation report is an excerpt from Chapter 18,titled Justice,of the book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.It delves into the influence of slavery on American history,specifically the position and contribution of African Americans to American culture,society,and history.For this reason,Nikole HannahJones,one of the authors of this book,was recognized with the Pulitzer Prize for her exceptional work.The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story covers historical events and figures,includes information such as statistics,arguments,and analysis,and is characterized by objectivity,accuracy,and logic,making it an informative text.One of the lexical features is the high-frequency use of nouns,adverbs,verbs,and adjectives.In terms of sentence structure,the text contains a large number of subordinate clauses and complex sentences,vocabulary and sentence structure entail the issue of equivalence between the source and target language when translating.Therefore,this translation practice is guided by Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory,focusing on exploring the practical application of the category shifts theory under the framework,analyzing the phenomenon of formal deviation between the source language and the target language,and striving for maximum content equivalence in translation.This report is composed of five chapters.Chapter One serves as an introduction,introducing the translation material’s source,background,author,and content.Chapter Two describes the translation task,including pre-translation preparation,selection of translation tools,analysis of the text during translation,search for parallel texts,and post-translation proofreading and revision.Chapter Three contains an introduction to a review of domestic and foreign literature and a feasibility analysis of Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory for this report.Case analysis in Chapter Four is the most important section,in which the translator makes translation analysis from three perspectives: structural shifts,unit shifts,and class shifts.Chapter Five is a concluding section,summarizing the findings and deficiencies of this report.Through this practice,the translator discovered that based on the language characteristics of the selected materials,Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory can be effectively utilized to analyze the relationship between English grammar,sentence structures,and Chinese syntax at three levels: structure,units,and class.By shifting the form and syntax,the translation equivalence can be better achieved,thus providing a reference and inspiration for the English-to-Chinese translation practice of informative text.