Catford's Translation Shifts Explained
J. C. Catford described translation as a series of departures from formal correspondence. He called these departures shifts and grouped them into two families: level shifts and category shifts.
Level shifts
A level shift moves between grammar and lexis. Russian aspect, encoded grammatically, often comes into English as a lexical adverb (already, still, finally). The information is preserved; the level changes.
Category shifts
- Structure shift: word order or clause structure changes.
- Class shift: part of speech changes (a noun in the source becomes a verb in the target).
- Unit shift: a single source word maps to a target phrase, or vice versa.
- Intra-system shift: source and target both have the system (e.g. number) but choose differently for the same referent.
Further reading: dynamic vs formal equivalence, field, tenor, mode.