A Translation Practice Report On Uplifting The People:Three Centuries Of Black Baptists In Alabama (Chapter 2)

The church plays a great role in the American daily life in history, and about eighty percent of American people are Christian at present. Religion constitutes the spiritual pillar of American people and exercises great influence on the values, attitudes toward life and code of ethics of American people. Therefore, religion is an indispensable part of American culture. Many Chinese people try to understand American culture by reading translated religious books. However, there are few books about American religion and American religious history at home, which is far from meeting the needs of the people interested in such a field. In light of the circumstances, a book about American religion is selected as the source text of this translation report. To be specific, the source text is extracted from Uplifting the People:Three Centuries of Black Baptists in Alabama which consists of five chapters that are represented in chronological order and demonstrates how black Baptists in Alabama coped with repression when they were in face of the exploitation of slavery, disfranchisement, legal segregation, racial violence, lack of state-sponsored education. This translation report chooses Chapter Two as the source text with the guidance of functional equivalence put forward by the renowned American linguist Eugene Nida in the course of translation. The excerpt relates to the function and the development of black Baptist church and association, women's movement, black nationalism, denominational concerns in Alabama, and the foundation of Selma University and the introduction of its presidents from 1874 to 1900.The translation practice report comprises four parts. The first part involves a brief introduction to the background information, objective, significance and structure of this translation report as well as functional equivalence theory applied in translating. The second part describes the content, language style and structural characteristics of the source text. The third part analyzes the difficulties encountered in translation process, that is, the translation of names of people, religious terms, and long and complicated sentences. Combining with the functional equivalence, the author also discusses the solutions to these difficulties, that is, the employment of literal translation, free translation, inversion and conversion. The fourth part summarizes the enlightenment and experience the author has gained from the translation process and proposes the problems to be solved.