A Report On E-C Translation Of Judicial Documents Under Static Equivalence Theory

With the development of the rule of law in China,more and more attention has been paid to legal translation.Judicial documents,as a subtype of legal texts,are an important subject matter of legal translation and legal translation study.However,most recent studies treat legal texts as a whole,and rarely focus on the specific types of legal texts like judicial documents.Taking the judgment of New and Old Music Group v.Gottwald as an example,this report intends to make a systematic study of the English-Chinese translation of judicial documents and put forward proper translation solutions.Judicial documents contain a large number of legal terminologies and case citations,and widely adopt special sentence patterns in addition to compound sentences typical of legal texts.Judicial documents also have rigorous structure,solemn style and strict logic development.These linguistic features pose great challenges to translators,who constantly face the following problems that will hinder the accurate delivery of legal information in judicial documents in translation practices.Firstly,at the lexical level,the translation of terminologies is inconsistent,and abbreviations and citations are missing in the translated text;secondly,at the syntactic level,the special sentence patterns of legal texts are not accurately translated,and the compound sentences are not appropriately handled;finally,at the textual level,the coherence of texts is insufficient,the format of the source text and the target text is inconsistent,and the strictness of logic is not preserved.On the basis of fully recognizing the lexical,syntactic and textual features as well as the functions of judicial documents,and guided by static equivalence theory,translators can adopt the following solutions:(1)problems at the lexical level can be solved through literal translation and supplementing missing information;(2)at the syntactic level,the accurate transmission of information in the original sentences can be reproduced by substituting for proper legal expressions and adjusting the sequence of compound sentences;(3)at the textual level,the underlying legal reasoning of the source text can be reflected by supplementing conjunctions and retaining the source text format.The above solutions can effectively improve the accuracy,readability and authoritativeness in the translation of judicial documents.