Selected E-C Translation Of These United States And A Critical Commentary

This translation project contains two parts:the E-C translation of an excerpt of These United States, Concise Edition (2006), the Questions of Our Past Volume Ⅱ since 1865 (Chapter 21:The American Empire) and critical commentary that reviews the process of translation. The author of the source text, Irwin Unger, is an American historian and academic, who was awarded Pulitzer Prize for History in 1965 with his book The Greenback Era. He specializes in economic history, the history of the 1960s, and the history of the Gilded Age. These United States, Concise Edition, is a book in two volumes that is intended as a text book for a college audience.The source text for this translation project belongs with what Katharina Reiss refers to as "informative text". Accordingly, in the process of translation, the translator has tried to draw on the Skopos theory in a way to better present the information contained in the source text. The theory orients a more functional and socio-cultural concept of translation, and focuses above all on the purpose of the translation. Strategies employed in this program like negation, repetition, combination and addition are adopted to achieve a functionally adequate result. References are also made to the three most important rules of the Skopos theory, ie. the skopos rule, the coherence rule and the fidelity rule.Through the execution of the project, the translator has become more aware of the importance of differentiating texts in accordance with the purpose of the texts to be translated. She has learned, too, that strategies of translation should vary from one text to another; and that theories, if properly used, can be of great help in resolving problems that may baffle the translator if he or she is ignorant of such theories.Finally, it is hoped that the present project may be of some use to Chinese readers who have interest in history in general and in American history in particular. For the ultimate purpose of any translation is to bridge the gap between cultures and promote understanding among people of different cultures or nations.