Translation shifts

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Catford (1965) is the first scholar who uses
the term “shift” to refer to “departures
from formal correspondence in the process
of
going from the SL (source language) to the
TL (target language)
two kinds of shifts:

obligatoray optional
 Obligatory shifts occur due to syntactic, semantic,
phonological, and cultural differences between the
source language (SL) and the target language (TL

optional shifts occur due to the translator’s choice

and not to linguistic or cultural differences between
two languages
John C. Catford

Level shift:
Structural shifts
Category shift
Class shifts

Unit shifts

Intra-system shifts
 Anton Popovic 1970

The Concept “Shift of Expression” in Translation Analysis,

defines translation shift as “all that appears as new with
respect to the original,or fails to appear where it might
have been expected, may be interpreted as a shift.

He considers four levels at which translation shifts can occur:

a. Subjective/ objective: this level includes constitutive and individual

shifts.
b. Invariant/ variant: this level involves the negative and positive
shifts
c. Macrostructure/ microstructure of the text: a wide range of shift
types are involved in this level depending on the extent of text in
which shifts occur.
d. Functionality/ baselessness: this level is “understood as an
expression of those aspects of translation style.
 Kitty van Leuven-Zwart 1989

Zwart develops her model in order to describe “integral translations

of fictional narrative texts”

Zwart’s model to shift analysis involves: comparative model, and

descriptive model.
This model consists of four steps:
1) textual units from ST and TT should be chosen. Zwart calls these
units “transemes”.
2) The “architranseme”, which is the invariant core of the ST
transeme, is identified.
3) A comparison between transemes and architransemes is made in
order to establish the relationship between them; the relationship is
either synonymic or hyponymic
4) The final step is to classify pairs of transemes according to their
relationship
Shoshana Blum-Kulka 1986

“a discoursal and communicative approach to the study of translation”

Cohesion shifts
when the cohesive markers are changed during translation. Which affect
either the level of explicitness or text meaning.
Coherence shifts
“the realization(s) of the text’s meaning potential.”
Hatim and Munday2004

Hatim and Munday (2004) define translation shifts as “the

small linguistic changes that occur between ST and TT.”

Hatim and Munday are much concerned with the

communicative interaction between readers and writers
Examples