Translation Of Abstracts Of Legal Papers

As is well known, in academic journals, an abstract is usually required to place before an article to give a brief statement or a summary of the contents of the paper. Since China is opening to the outside world and is endeavoring to introduce what she has accomplished worldwide, it is not uncommon that the abstract of an article in the journal is required to be translated into English with a view to arousing the interest of the foreign readers, which may induces them to go further to peruse the whole article. Thus the main aim of the abstract, i.e. catching the readers' eye achieves. However, translation of an abstract into English is by no means an easy job, especially translating the abstract of an article on law.Not a few people have tried to engage in legal translation, but the present situation is by far from satisfaction due to the high academic techniques and abundant jargons in the legal papers' abstracts. What is worse is that little regard is paid towards the study of the theories of translation of abstracts. And if there is any, the focus is mainly on translation strategies and principles from the perspective of lexis and sentence. No systemic and holistic study on translation of the abstract of articles in legal journals has been carried out, still less one from the angle of discourse analysis.As such, this thesis tries to make a break through in the theoretical as well as empirical study of translation of legal papers' abstracts with the assistance of the accomplishments in the discourse analysis research area. Based on the fundamental concepts in discourse analysis, this author examines the present situation of translation of abstracts in China's legal journals, mainly in the aspects of thematic progression, information structure, foregrounding, cohesion and coherence. It finds that the predominant pattern of the English versions of abstracts in the journals of law is constant theme. Information structure is employed for the purposes of setting information transmission patterns and following the D-tree formula, the translated version will be well arranged in accordance with idiomatic English expressions. Foregrounding is applied to make specific legal terms in the translated version more comprehensible and to preserve more effectively the stylistic features of the original in the process of translation. Finally, cohesive devices are deemed conducive to organization of a coherent discourse while translating the abstract of a legal article from English into Chinese. In a word, the present thesis is conducive to legal papers' abstracts translation. Furthermore, it is hoped that the accomplishments of the present endeavor of this author will be employed further in the legal English education at law schools so that the students, or more exactly speaking, the would-be translators of the abstracts of legal papers will better their abstracts translation work in the future.