A Report On The C-E Translation Of Tea In The Frontier: Tea Tracing In Mengku (Chapter 1)

With the development of economy and society,the exchanges between countries in the world are more and more intensive.The exchanges not only can be found in economic activities,but also in culture spheres.Tea culture,as a typical traditional Chinese culture,has been attracting attention at home and abroad.As a way of communication,tea translation is conducive to promoting our tea culture to the world and improving our cultural international competitiveness.This is a Chinese-English translation practice report,and the translated text is selected from the book Tea in the Frontier Area: Tea Trace in Mengku.The book mainly tells what the author and his party saw and heard about tea after they came to Mengku town.The author selected the first chapter Mengku,a town famous for tea to do the translation practice.The chapter mainly describes the story happening in the tea factory and the local people who engaged in tea work.The source text has the characteristics of both informative text and expressive text.In order to convey the source text to the target readers successfully,the author chooses Catford’s“Translation Shift” theory to guide the translation of this text.This theory,from the perspective of linguistics,divides the translation shift into level shift and category shift.With these two categories of shifts,the translator has effectively solved the problems encountered in translating Chinese into English in terms of lexis and sentence.Level shift is use to cope with singular and plural forms of nouns and tense and aspect of verbs.Category shift is divided into four types of shifts:structure shift,unit shift,class shift and intra-system-shift.?Structure shift is performed to transform non-subject sentences in Chinese,as well as sentences which the subject is the object into passive sentences.Class shift is adopted to change the part of the speech.Both structure shift and unit shift are employed to the translation of complicated and long sentences.Intra-system-shift is conducted to systematically transform culture-loaded words.This report provides research and summary on the translation practice of the first chapter of Tea in the Frontier Area: Tea Trace in Mengku,which has a certain enlightening effect on the research of English translation of tea texts.In the meanwhile,through the analysis of different examples,this report indicates the crucial guiding role of “Translation Shift” theory in the translation of such texts.It is expected to provide some reference and contributions for other translation when translating tea texts from Chinese into English.