A Report On E-C Translation Of Future Tech: How To Capture Value From Disruptive Industry Trends (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Catford’s Translation Shift Theory

Scientific and technological development has always been regarded as one of the most effective means to improve the comprehensive force of all countries and regions.Nowadays,the instability of the world is increasing rapidly under the influence of many factors,such as the COVID-19 epidemic,climate change and regional conflicts.Countries or regions that can grasp the future trend of science and technology will have more ability to fight against the instability.Therefore,the Chinese translation of the text about the future trend of science and technology can provide a good reference for the development of China’s science and technology.The source text for this report is from the first and sixth chapters of Future Tech: How to Capture Value from Disruptive Industry Trends by American futurist Trond Arne Undheim,which mainly discusses the key factors influencing future technology trend in the current complex and changing world situation,and introduces five cutting-edge technologies that may play important roles in the future.In general,the selected source text has the basic characteristics of typical sci-tech texts,showing linguistic phenomena such as nominalization,attributive postposition,and long difficult sentences.In order to achieve accurate and objective transmission of the original content,the translator takes the Catford’s translation shift theory as the guiding framework,to conducts the comprehension,analysis and language shift of the source text from the directions of level shift and category shift,demonstrating the important guiding significance of Catford’s translation shift theory for the E-C translation of sci-tech texts.According to this translation practice,level shifts can help to resolve translation difficulties in the plural form of nouns and tenses,while category shifts(subdivided into structure shifts,class shifts and unit shifts)can make the translation more in line with the Chinese expression habits,thus enhancing the readability and acceptability of target text,which makes the translator fully realize the important value of combining Catford’s Translation Shift Theory with the translation of sci-tech texts in improving translation quality.