A Report On English-Chinese Translation Of Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?(Chapter1)

This is an English-Chinese translation report selected from the book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria written by an American clinical psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum.Beverly Daniel Tatum wrote the book from the perspective of a psychologist,showing readers the dialogue of racial discrimination and individual racial identification in American society.The report selects the introduction part and first chapter as the content of this translation practice,summarizes the professional language features of the source text and the difficulties met in translating the selected parts of the book,and proposes corresponding translation strategies and methods for the examples of translation difficulties.The translation report starts with a brief introduction of the translation task and the translation process.Then,the translator generalizes the difficulties encountered during the translation process into three levels: lexical,syntactic and discourse levels.At lexical level,the difficulties include translation of proper nouns,polysemy,and parts of speech.At syntactic level,the difficulties mainly involve the translation of long sentences and attributive clauses.And the difficulties at discourse level illustrate discourse cohesion.Given these difficulties,the translator sums up the translation methods to solve the corresponding problems in the process of translating,including transliteration and annotation,choice of words' meaning,and conversion of parts of speech to words,sequential translation,division,rearrangement,preposition,postposition,and combination to sentences,and grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion adopted to achieve the discourse coherence.The original language is difficult,which helps to enhance the translator's translation competence.In addition,the translator has a further understanding ofAmerican culture on the basis of realizing the race culture.Finally,the translator also expects that the translation of the original text can provide a reference for other translators who have intention to translate literature of this type.