A Probe into Shifting of Parts of Speech in English-Chinese Translation . Introduction Parts of speech are the core content of the traditional grammar. Each language has been greatly affected by its own natural environment, geographical location, unique history and cultural tradition, which lead to the great distinct in vocabulary, so different languages have different standards to classify parts of speech. English belongs to the Indo-European language family and its parts of speech are categorized as word order, lexical meaning and inflection changes.1 English nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs have complex system of endings or vowel changes or both. But Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family and its parts of speech divided based on sentence structure function.2 When we translate one language to another, we commonly use the technique of the shifting of parts of speech in order to make the translated version more idiomatic. Eugene A, Nida, a distinguished American theorist, reformed the traditional parts of speech and established a new system which has been applied widely into practice. There are different expressions expressing the same meaning, thus, the shifting of parts of speech is based on the premise that the target language must be faithful to the source language. Therefore, correctly using the shifting of parts of speech can make the English translation works more faithful. So its necessary and important to master the skills of the shifting of parts of speech in English to Chinese translation. This thesis will study the importance of shifting of parts of speech and discuss some rules of the shifting. Translation and shifting of parts of speech It is difficult to give a clear definition for translation. Translation is just understood as a linguistic phenomenon which is a process of translating between source language (SL) and target language (TL). Different dictionaries give different description on translation as “interpretation”, “conversion”, “transformation”, “transference” ,from one language to another. And some linguists describe translation with such expressions, “similar”, “comparable”, “equivalent textual material”, etc. Roger Bell, a professor of linguistics, says that: “Translation is the expression in another, source language, preserving semantic and stylistic equivalence.” Again, we have a descriptive definition from Nida: Translating consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message, first in terms of meaning, and secondly in terms of style. The two definitions both refer to “equivalence”. But there is no total equivalence between two languages. So sometimes we need to shift one part of speech in SL to another part of speech in TL. Shifting of parts of speech is an important method of translation which translates one part of speech in SL to another part of speech in TL. It is used for helping translators to make more idiomatic translation works. The shifts and changes in translation do not occur at random. They are caused by different cultures and different languages. Different cultures refer to different religions, different life styles, and different histories. Different languages refer to different standards to distinguish parts of speech and different language structures. They have different standards to distinguish their own parts of speech, because they belong to different language families. Translation is not as easy as you imagine. To reproduce the message in SL, one must make a good many adjustments. There are some adjustments, such as semantic adjustment, word order adjustment and grammatical adjustment.3 The shifting of parts of speech is widely used by translators as one method of grammatical adjustment. As a translation method, the shifting parts of speech must obey some objective rules. First, it must correspond with the basic principles of translation. The most influential translation principle in the history if Chinese tradition theory was formulated by Yan Fu, who put forward the famous three-character principle of translation: faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance.4 Moreover, as we shift parts of speech, we must take different writing styles into consideration. Shifting of parts of speech is not only common but also of vital importance in translation in the course of translating activity. We can learn from the following examples: SL: He bent solely upon profit. TL: 他只屈身于利润之前。 只有利润才能使他低头。 他唯利是图。 The third one is the best because of adopting the technique of the shifting of parts of speech. Only by this can the accurate messages be conveyed and understood by readers. Though parts of speech in English and Chinese both can be classified into two groups, content words and functional words, the parts of speech and its number are respectively different. In English the content words are nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverb