shifts translaton11

Task A4.1
➤ Look at these two examples. How many departures from formal correspondence
can you detect? How do you decide what a departure is?
Analysing these examples, it is clear that there are many formal correspondences at
lexical and grammatical levels:
please – bitte
beachten – note
that – daß
smoke detectors – Rauchdetektoren
will be – werden

Systemic differences between the languages must be accepted. These include wordorder
changes and the construction of the German imperative with the addition
of the pronoun Sie [‘you’]. However, there is a clear departure from formal
correspondence in the translation of the ST on-board and the restructuring of the
second clause. In this text, the only possible textual equivalent for on-board is die
Züge (‘the trains’) which is added with a change of grammatical subject (ST smoke
detectors to TT die Züge). The analyst then has to decide whether ausgestattet is a
formal correspondent of fitted. A dictionary definition is not enough since some
dictionaries may give ausstatten as a translation of to equip or fit out but not fit.
However, the role occupied by ausgestattet and fitted in the two languages is very
similar, so it is highly unlikely that we would class this as a shift.
Catford was the first to use the term shift, but the most comprehensive taxonomy
of translation shifts, based on their ‘translation procedures’, was set out by the
Canadians Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet in their A Comparative Stylistics
of French and English (1958/1995).While it is true that they approach the subject
from the point of view of comparative or contrastive stylistics, using parallel
non-translated as well as translated texts, they describe a detailed and systematic
model for the analysis and comparison of a ST–TT pair. The first step involves
identification and numbering of the ST units and the units of translation (see
Section A, Unit 3). This is followed by a matching of the two.