-ism and -ist

[mungouk 801]

I tried looking for "racist" (adjective) and all I found in Pleco and MDBG was： 

 

              种族主义者    種族主義者    zhǒng zú zhǔ yì zhě    racist (person)
 

Which clearly refers to a person, since it ends with -者

And since 主义 also denotes an "-ism", 种族主义 is "racism" or racist ideology.

 

For "racist" (adjective) can I assume that we take the -ism, add  的 and it becomes an adjective (or rather, an attributive)...?

So... is this a generalisable pattern?

 

       racist (adj)      —    种族主义的

       Marxist (adj)  — 马克思主义的

       feminist (adj) —     女性主义的   

and so on...?

[Demonic_Duck 1,203]

-主义（-者） is somewhat generalizable for ideologies, but not necessarily for -isms (which aren't always ideologies - can also be prejudices, religions, philosophies, and so on).

 

The more common meaning of "racism" (as a type of prejudice, rather than a formal ideology) is 种族歧视. "Feminism" is most commonly 女权主义. Judaism is 犹太教. Confucianism is 儒教 or 儒家, depending if the religious or philosophical aspect is emphasized; similarly for Taoism (道教/道家).

[Dlezcano 40]

It's not that simple because you can't always expect having equivalent words (not only by meaning but also grammatically) between two languages. For instance, if you say in English "that is racist" a Chinese would rather say “那(根本就)是种族歧视" instead an awkward sounding sentence like "那是一件种族歧视的事". 

[mungouk 801]

8 hours ago, Dlezcano said:

you can't always expect having equivalent words

 

Sure, and that's why I was asking.

 

How about in a newspaper article 书面语  rather than conversation 口语... would you use an attributive then, or does it still sound clunky?

 

For example:

 

            The government's racist immigration policy was very unpopular. 

[Dlezcano 40]

That sentence is quite tricky, since in Chinese you usually have to specify who the subject of that racism is. If it is against Chinese people I would use words like 反华 or 排华, but if it is against other races like black people maybe we could use 反黑.

If you want a 书面语 translation I'd write

政府推出的反华移民政策引起了轩然大波。

As you can see, using one word or another one depends a lot from the context, I personally couldn't figure out how to use 种族歧视 or 种族主义 for this case. Maybe somebody else will get a better translation.