Selected Translation Of Chapter One And Chapter Two In The African American Predicament

This project is a selected translation of The African American Predicament, which was published in1999by Brookings Institution Press, with Christopher H. Foreman Jr. as its editor. The book collects thirteen timely essays concerning the fate of the African Americans. The selected part includes Chapter one and Chapter two, respectively,"The Legacy of Slavery" by Glenn C.Loury,"Black Progress" by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, and "Affirmative Action" by Orlando Patterson. The first essay covers the issue of today’s race problems and the rooted reason accounting for the problems. The second essay concerns about the progress the African American achieved since1940.The third essay discusses the affirmative action and its politics of controversy and provides a wise suggestion for practicing affirmative action.In translation, the translator finds four difficult points as follows. Firstly, the three selected essays are so strict in logic that it is not easy to make out the internal relationship among its constituents. Secondly, from the lexical perspective, the frequent use of terminology and obscure words brings about difficulty to the accurate understanding of the semantic meaning. Thirdly, from the syntactic perspective, rhetorical sentences and complex sentences render the translation even tougher. Finally, from the discourse perspective, cultural difference and cohesion difference make expression a tough job for the translator to produce an equivalent translation to achieve the dynamic equivalence as proposed by the well-known American linguist Eugene A.Nida.The project includes two parts. The first part is the translation and the second part is the critical commentary on the translation. In the critical commentary, the above difficulties in translation are discussed and solutions are provided accordingly. Considering terminology, the strategy of in-text note and footnote is used to further explain the detailed information of a given terminology. As for the obscure and abstract words, semantic extension is adopted to make the translation readable. In terms of rhetorical sentences, the strategy of domestication is resorted to while in terms of long and complex sentences, inversion and reorganization are involved. In other words, it means to invert the original syntactical order or to readjust the original syntactical order. When it comes to the difficulties at textual level, a comparative study of the language features of both English and Chinese is made, especially from the perspective of discourse cohesion. What’s more, the style and tone are taken into consideration to make the translation a dynamic equivalence of the original text.The significance of the project lies in two ways. Generally, the translated text will be of some referential values to Chinese readers who may be interested in or who are conducting researches on the current situation of African Americans. Academically, the topics discussed in the Critical Commentary section will be of some inspirational significance to translators or people who are keen on translation studies.