A Report On Chinese-English Translation Of Essentials Of Intellectual Property:Institutional Innovation And Knowledge Innovation(Chapter Seven)

This report is based on a C-E translation project of the seventh chapter of Essentials of Intellectual Property: Institutional Innovation and Knowledge Innovation published in 2010 by Law Press · China.The total number of Chinese characters in the source text is 17,554.Titling the chapter “Legal Culture and Innovative Culture — A Cultural Analysis of the Intellectual Property Regime”,Professor Wu Handong,the author and also one of the most prominent figures in the studies of intellectual property rights(IPRs),expounds the cultural preconceptions and social prerequisites for the “domestication” of intellectual property(IP)laws in China.With a comparative study of cultural undertone of China and the West,it is pointed out that supportive approaches promoting economy,policy making,publicity and education should be adopted so as to facilitate the enactment and localization of relevant laws in China.Through text analysis,the translator finds that the source text involves a large number of professional terms and culture-loaded terms.At the syntactic level,there are Chinese paratactic sentences as well as parallel structures frequently used in academic papers that make tones convincing.At the textual level,the source text features logical argument and covert cohesion.When it comes to the stylistic feature,objectivity is the most obvious one.In view of the above characteristics of the original text and the requirements of the client,the translator chooses Eugune A.Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory as guidance in completing this translation task.In this regard,for the culture-loaded items in the source text,based on the theory aforementioned,the translator adds annotations to give relevant information,making the cultural factors clearly understood by target readers.Dealing with Chinese paratactic sentences,the process of analysis,transfer,and reconstruct as suggested by Nida provides guidance.For the purpose of obtaining an idiomatic target version using common sentence structures in English,translation techniques including combination,division,and readjustment of sentence order are adopted.At the stylistic level,attention is paid on the issue of nominalization to make the target version moreobjective and concise.In a word,in translating this legal academic paper,the Functional Equivalence Theory plays an important guiding role in coping with specific translation difficulties.The translator gains a lot after completing this task,to be specific,her ability of information gathering strengthened,English level improved,and legal literacy accumulated.In addition,the translator attempts to improve the quality of the translation,hoping that foreigners could acquire knowledge about the IP development in China through reading the target text.