A Practice Report On The E-C Translation Of NFPA1 Fire Code From The Perspective Of Translation Shift Theory

Fire code,issued by national administrations to unify the technical regulations on fire prevention and control,represents the mandatory requirements for standardizing construction procedures.Indeed,increasing international exchanges on fire protection technologies with other countries and regions enable China get multiple channels to have access to various documents and codes,and build up a scientific and viable system for the formulation of fire codes.To be sure,only a few codes have been translated into Chinese,and there are a large number of technical errors and wrong terminology,which lead to a significant reduction of our gains in technological exchanges and mutual study.That’s why we should dig into the researches on code translation,working out better translation of these codes under the guidance of translation theory.Therefore,the author translated the first part of NFPA 1 Fire Code into Chinese and made analysis on ST and TT from the perspective of Translation Shift Theory,a theory created by Catford(British translator).At first,the linguistic levels were analyzed,and then a further distinction between level correspondence and category correspondence were conducted.At last four shifts were mentioned between different linguistic levels —— lexis,sentences and groups,respectively,aiming to finish a precise translation text of fire code.The thesis,from the perspective of Translation Shift Theory,gives a clear and detailed exposition of how the translator combines the code translation with Catford’s theory,and thinks in terms of the theory while working out some problems in translating,such as handling with long and complex sentences,sentences in passive voice,technical terms and other elusive parts:by Level shift,one of the shifts issued by Catford,translators get to know how to translate passive voice sentences;Unit Shift is utilized in the translation of long difficult sentences;Shift of class helps the mutual transferring between the dynamic Chinese and static English;and by the structural shift may perfect the translation work to be more readable.What’s more,a glossary will be established to unify the using of glossary.It is convincingly demonstrated that the theory is suitable for the translation of Fire Code and contributes to our targets of pursuing the fully correspondence of meaning and context.In conclusion,the theory is pretty practical to the translation of code documents.