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Chapter 3 Theory of translation shifts .............................. 7

3.1 Literature Review ............................ 7

3.2 Level Shift ................................. 9

Chapter 4 Case Analysis ........................... 11

4.1 Level Shifts .................................. 11

4.2 Category Shifts ............................ 14

Chapter 5 Conclusion ................................ 25

5.1 Major Gains................................. 25

5.2 Limitations ................................... 26

Chapter 4 Case Analysis

4.1 Level Shifts

Chinese and English are different from grammar and lexis. In order to achieve textual equivalence as much as possible, the translation will inevitably deviate from the form of the source text, which also accounts for the necessity of translation shifts. In Chapter 3, it has already been mentioned that according to systematic linguistics, the levels of language can be divided into phonology, graphology, grammar and lexis. Due to the great differences between English and Chinese in glyph and pronunciation, only shifts from grammar to lexis occur in the translation practice. Shifts at the grammatical level are primarily tense shifts. While at the lexical level, shifts of plural and singular forms and shifts of comparative and superlative degrees are common.

4.1.1 Shift of Tense

Tense is an important grammatical concept in both English and Chinese. In English, tense changes are mainly reflected through the morphological changes of verbs. On the contrary, there are no morphological changes and verbal inflections in Chinese grammar to mark different tenses. In Chinese,  characters such as “正在” “了” “过” “已经” are added to indicate the tense. In the source text, the author lists many issues that have already occurred in the world and also envisions many future situations when discussing “wicked problems” and the measures. Different tenses coexist in the source text. In translation, the translator adopts tense shifts to convey different tenses of the source text.

Chapter 5 Conclusion

5.1 Major Gains

First of all, English and Chinese belong to different language systems and each of them possess different linguistic characteristics. In the process of translation, there is no absolute “translation equivalence” between the source text and target text. The translator needs to choose appropriate translation strategies and techniques based on the style and features of source text to convey the information in a faithful and readable way to achieve “translation equivalence” as much as possible.

Secondly, the source text belongs to what Catford calls informative texts whose core function is to convey information accurately to readers. It uses a large number of professional terms and involves considerable background knowledge in the field of political systems and public administration. In order to have a general idea of the text to be translated in advance, the translator read re本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。