E-C Translation Of The Seventh Chapter From Race Law,and American Society:1607to Present And A Critical Commentary

This project is an English-Chinese translation, together with a critical commentary. The original text is Chapter VII of "Race, Crime, and Injustice" of Race, Law, and American Society:1607to Present, by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, published by the Publisher of Routledge on January1st,2007. The author Browne-Marshall mainly talks about Blacks’historical struggles for freedom, equality and justice, as well as their roles in American social life, with various law cases related to Blacks as argument evidence. The pericope,"Race, Crime, and Injustice," illustrates great challenges Blacks have faced from slavery to the present period within the criminal justice system. The disparity in the administration of justice, which began in slavery time and continued well after slavery was abolished, is examined in this chapter.In the course of translation, some difficulties are found as follows. Firstly, because the original material is full of technical terms and expressions relating to legal text, it leads to comprehension problems for the translator. Secondly, from the lexical perspective, frequent use of common words with particular meanings, proper names and cases’names all makes it hard to concisely convey the message of the original text. Thirdly, from the syntactic perspective, sentences with passive and those with particular features of legal text are more difficult to be translated in the target language. Finally, from the discourse perspective, a great challenge looms ahead considering the representation, in the translated text, of both the informative and narrative style of the original text.In the critical commentary, the above problems in translation are discussed and solutions are offered accordingly. For a translation being loyal to the original text, the method of foreignization, transliteration and literal translation are considered on translating common words with particular meanings, proper names and cases’names. For the sake of the demands of target language readers, strategies such as foreignization and domestication, and omission and amplification are applied in sentence translation. Further, the approaches of keeping the passive pattern or altering it into active voice are adopted in dealing with sentences of passive voices. In order to reflect the style of the original text, the language features of being informative and narrative shall be always kept in mind.The significance of the project lies in two aspects. For one thing, it is valuable, academically and culturally, to describe racial issues and their impacts from the perspective of law. For another, the translation is of great benefits to the translator who has learned, through the practice, the methods to render into Chinese language the informative and narrative English texts with features of legal texts. These methods or approaches are summarized in hoping to promote future translation of the same kind.