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

This project is a translation of the fourth chapter of Race, Law, and American Society:1607to present (2nd Revised Edition)from English to Chinese. The book, written by Gloria Browne Marshall, an American writer and an associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), was published by the Routledge, London in2013. In this book, the author traces the history of racial discrimination in American law from colonial times to present, analyzing the key court cases that established America’s racial system and showing their impacts on American society. The book is organized by the topic areas covering education, property rights, civil liberties, voting rights, the military, criminal justice, and internationalism.The pericope that is translated,"Civil Liberties and Racial Justice", is the fourth chapter of this book, in which the age-long fight that Blacks waged for fundamental freedoms and first-class citizenship is depicted by some well-known court cases: Demonstration marches, Sit-ins, and Urban uprisings. Besides, this chapter examines how Blacks gained civil liberties and then used those rights to fight for freedom. Court cases illustrate how Blacks challenged laws that restricted their right to free association and marriage. The Virginia case of Bailey v. Poindexter, to some extent, best illustrates the prohibition of individual will. The case of Denmark Vesey presents that slaves have no free will to determine whether they should be free or remain enslaved. The cases of protest marches and Sit-Ins arouse public concern to racial injustice and demonstrate the unity and power of the masses. The case of Pace v. Alabama depicts the Blacks’ fighting for freedom considering Interracial Relationship and so forth.In translation, the translator comes across several difficulties as follows. Firstly, at the lexical level, the original meanings of some words and expressions in the dictionary cannot immediately be applied to the Chinese context. Secondly, at the syntactic level, the long and complex English sentences often lead to comprehension difficulties. Finally, at the discourse level, cultural and individual differences make it hard to achieve the purpose of discourse coherence. The translation project includes two parts. The first part is the E-C translation of the selected text and the second part is the critical commentary on the translation. In the critical commentary, the above problems in translation are discussed and solutions are offered accordingly. Considering the exact meaning in the given context, the approach of meaning extension is applied. Extending the meaning of the words and expressions follows both the paraphrase in the dictionary and the given context. For complex sentences especially long sentences over-burdened by complex noun phrases, the translator practices the approach of sentence restructuring. It means that the original order should be rearranged to keep the translated version more fluent. In terms of translation at the discourse level, diversified approaches are applied to achieve the fidelity rule and coherence rule under the skopos theory proposed by Hans J. Vermeer.The significance of the project lies in two ways. For one thing, it is of high research value to make readers get to know the legal process in America. For another, the approaches discussed in the Critical Commentary, including meaning extension, amplification, omission, sentence restructuring and so forth are of referential value to similar translation practice.