A Report On The Translation Of American Slavery:a Very Short Introduction (Excerpts)

American Slavery: A Very Short Introduction was written by Heather Andrea Williams, a well-known scholar of African American studies. It was first published in2014 by the Oxford University Press. Beginning with the Portuguese exploration of the coast of West Africa in 1444, it gives a concise introduction to the origin,development, work, struggles and final abrogation of American slavery. Notably,many primary documents have been quoted or referred to, making the book much more reliable and readable.The report consists of two major sections. One is the English-Chinese translation of the first three chapters of American Slavery: A Very Short Introduction and the other a theoretical study of the translation practice in the light of Catford's Translation Shifts and Reiss' s Text Typology. Shifts are concerned mostly with grammatical changes, e.g. changes of sentence structures and parts of speech. Text typology,unlikely, emphasizes textual analysis of the source text and seeks for functional equivalence between the source and target texts.By comparison of the source and target texts, it is found that linguistic changes occurs frequently when the two languages involved differ from each other greatly, as is often the case with English and Chinese. It is also found that textual analysis enables the translator to have a more comprehensive understanding of the source text,which contributes to the selection of proper translation strategies and the generation of functional equivalence.