A Report Of The Chinese Translation Of Elements Of International Law(Excerpts)

Since China’s entry into WTO,China’s economic development has been unprecedented,foreign trade has increased year by year,and all kinds of relevant legal documents have played an increasingly important role.Therefore,the study of Chinese translation of legal English has become an important subject for Chinese translation researchers.The source text is Elements of International Law,written by American public law scholar,judge and lawyer Henry Wheaton,and published in1836 as an authoritative work of international law in the West and the first systematic treatise written in English on international law.The author is responsible for the translation of excerpt section of the source text volume 2,chapter 1,and the number of words is about 10,000 words.This translation practice report consists of six parts: introduction,brief introduction of translation process,legal language characteristics,four basic principles of legal translation,case analysis and summary of translation practice.It is mainly based on the four basic principles of legal translation put forward by Professor Zhang Falian and the concept of informative text in K.Reiss’ s textual type theory to explore the translation strategies that should be adopted in the translation of legal texts.According to the four standards of precision and correctness,equivalence and consistency,normalization and technicality,and clarity and conciseness,the authorrevises translated version repeatedly to enhance the readability of the translation so as to ensure the quality and accuracy of the translation.In the translation practice report,the author takes several sentence patterns and technical terms as examples to illustrate the difficulties and solutions in translation: introducing the use of literal translation techniques in the practice of legal translation;combining legal common sense with parallel text to analyze specific meanings in every contexts;giving examples and analyzing long difficult sentences,conditional sentences and passive sentences in legal texts,then drawing the conclusions: using the method of separating meaning groups when dealing with long difficult sentences,distinguishing each leading words of conditional sentences when dealing with conditional sentences,dealing with passive sentences according to the Chinese customary expression;keeping consistency in text translation.Case study and the summary of translation practice show that under the guidance of the four basic principles of legal translation,the author grasps the characteristics of legal language and combines the characteristics of language with the translation strategies of specific terms and sentence patterns,the author’s translation quality and accuracy have been improved.