Selected Translation Ofthe Fifth Chapter Of The African American Predicament

This project is a selected translation of the fifth chapter of The African American Predicament into Chinese, together with a critical commentary of the translation.The African American Predicament, edited by Christopher H. Foreman Jr., was published by the Brookings Institution Press in Washington, D.C. in1999. It displays the racial problems with which African Americans are confronted. This book collects thirteen influential essays which analyze the difficulties in the enhancement of the status of African Americans. There are five chapters in this book. This project involves two excerpts from the fifth chapter of The African American Predicament:"American Racial and Ethnic Politics in the Twenty-First Century" by Jennifer L. Hochschild and "The Unsteady March toward Racial Equality" by Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith.The translation is completed based on Skopos theory, and accordingly domestication is adopted. Skopos theory holds that the prime principle determining any translation process is the purpose (Skopos) of the overall translation task. Domestication is the strategy of making text closely conform to the culture of the language being translated to.The main purpose of this translation is to offer information about American racial problems to Chinese readers.To achieve this goal, the translation is oriented to idiomatic Chinese expressions. In translation, the translation of people’s names, terminologies and long and complex sentences are the key points. Therefore, strategies such as application of parallel texts, translation into Chinese idioms, division of complex sentences and reinventing sentence structures are adopted to deal with the difficult points, so that the translated text is easily understood by Chinese readers. In this sense the translation purpose is achieved.Translation of the two selected articles aims at objectively revealing the development and problems of American racial policies, and this project will be a reference for domestic scholars studying American racial and ethnic problems.