A Study On The E-C Translation Of Nominalization Structures From The Perspective Of Category Shift Theory

This translation practice project selects energy humanities literature authored by international scholars represented by Imre Szeman as the source texts,which respectively focus on the rise of energy humanities,the features of petroculture and the critical theory of energy,mainly exploring the intertwining relationships among social politics,economy,culture and environment.This project offers an introduction to the emerging energy humanities,with an expectation to provide references for related researches in China.The language of source texts is objective,logical and rigorous,and there are a large number of long and difficult sentences and nominalization structures.Especially,its nominalization structures are complex and diverse,whose semantic meanings are abstract and fuzzy,leading to the high information density and great difficulty in translation.Therefore,this paper selects nominalization structures in source texts as the research object and aims at summarizing some common category shifts and corresponding translation methods in the process of conversing nominalization structures through a case study,guided by the category shifts theory.This theory is a branch of translation shifts theory proposed by John C.Catford(1965)based on the linguistic viewpoints of Han Lee-der,which consists of structure shift,category shift,unit shift and internal system shift.However,all these shifts focus on the language,seldomly considering cultural communication and social context.Based on the category shift theory and given the semantic characteristics of the research object,this project will take into consideration two other shifts: compensation shift at the vocabulary level and logical shift at the sentence level as a supplement to Catford’s theory.It finds that the E-C translation of nominalization structures is related to its category.Based on its semantic characteristics and the social function of academic texts,the translation process finds out that there rarely exists internal system shift and that unit shift needn’t be classified separately since it is usually attached to structure shift.Therefore,the report will focus on four types of shifts: class shift,compensation shift,structure shift,and logic shift.For nouns,part-of-speech shift and compensation shift are of primary concern,which are converted through word increment and subtraction.When it comes to the nominal clause,the structure shift and logical shift are considered,which are achieved through splitting,ordering and logic manifestation.In conclusion,the dynamic semantic equivalence is supported in the theory of category shift,which proves very helpful to the E-C translation of nominalization structures in academic literature.Only through reasonable category shifts can the target texts be more accessible to its target readers with the information of source texts accurately and naturally conveyed.