An E-C Translation Project Of Washington’s Duke Ellington And A Critical Commentary

This E-C translation project of "Washington’s Duke Ellington" is divided into two parts:the first part is the translation of the original text, and the second part is the corresponding critical commentary. This commentary is based on the translation of the journal article----"Washington’s Duke Ellington", which is published on the scholarly journal Washington History, Vol.26, (Spring 2014) by the Historical Society of Washington D.C.The original text is written by John Edward Hasse, Curator of American Music at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. The hero of this article, Duke Ellington, is an American composer, pianist and bandleader of a jazz orchestra. He is generally regarded as the man who has elevated the perception of jazz to an art form with other traditional musical genres. The article gives a representation of Duke Ellington’s life and his success. From the representation, readers can have a full comprehension of this great jazz pioneer. The translation of this article will provide a new and deep perspective of jazz and a penetrative understanding of Duke Ellington for music learners, especially for jazz learners and jazz hobbyists. This article and its translation, therefore, will help advance jazz study and defuse culture gradually. Besides, swing-jazz, one kind of classical music, will be revalued to some extent, and colored races will be greatly encouraged again.The original text of this translation project is composed of the text, some illustrations and tables. Its context involves knowledge of jazz music, historical accidents, regional culture and names of persons and places as well as many direct speeches. In order to solve difficulties in this translation and to reproduce the meaning of the original text to the most extent, the translator employs some translation strategies such as literal translation with annotations, usage of four-character phrase, semantic explication, turning phrases into clauses reinventing sentence structure and so forth with the guidance of Eugene A. Nida’s Functional Equivalence.The critical commentary contains three sections:the first section gives an introduction to the source of the article, the original text, the translation backgrounds and translation significance of the materials; the second section analyses the translation difficulties,the theoretical framework of Functional Equivalence and the corresponding translation strategies with cases; the third section summarizes the translation project.