A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of A Legal Academic Text

With China’s opening up to the world and its increasingly greater involvement in globalization,legal translation is becoming more and more urgent in China.The amount of translated works has increased in recent years,but the overall quality is uneven.Therefore,it might be of certain practical significance to identify difficulties in translating legal texts and find some effective translation strategies for legal translation.The choice of translating the legal essay Why Is It Wrong to Punish Thought published in the Yale Law Journal in 2018 is based on this consideration This essay explains why the state must never punish people for their mere thoughts such as beliefs,desires and fantasies according to two principles:persons possess a right of mental integrity and the En.forceability ConstraintThis report has been divided into five chapters.Chapter One introduces the purpose and the significance of this report.Chapter Two describes the content of the legal essay and the translation process.Chapter Three reviews the Skopos Theory and analyzes the feasibility of applying this theory in legal translation.Chapter Four,the core part,explores language features of the essay at lexical level and syntactic level and discusses strategies for translating legal words and long sentences by analyzing examples from the essay.Chapter Five is the conclusion and it summarizes the findings obtained in this translation practice.In Skopos theory,skopos determines the translation process.Under the guidance of three rules of Skopos Theory,free translation,transliteration and non-translation methods are adopted to translate legal words;and linear translation,reverse translation and splitting translation methods are adopted to translate long sentences.During the translation process,the translator has become deeply aware of the difficulty of legal translation,especially the translation of legal words and long sentences.The translator has also become aware of the importance of accumulating legal knowledge for anyone aiming at learning to be a qualified legal translator.Through this report,the translator hopes to spread the cutting-edge foreign legal thoughts in the field of criminal jurisprudence to Chinese readers and provide some practical translation strategies for legal translators.