Translation Strategies For Legal Instruments

In recent years, China has become more frequently engaged in commercial andtrading exchanges with a number of countries, which inevitably produces a seriesof disputes. To resolve these disputes, they have to resort to legal proceedings,directly giving rise to the increasing demands for translation with regard torelevant legal instruments. After Hong Kong’s reunification with Mainland Chinaand for the purpose of following the historical trend, the scholars in Hong Kongtranslated a great deal of legal instruments drafted in English into Chinese, andindeed yielded fruitful research results upon legal translation. These parallel textsand research results are favorable for us to conduct systematic studies on legaltranslation.Legal instrument translation, falling into the category of non-literarytranslation, is characterized by its typical strict wording, complex sentencestructure and so forth. In this translation report, the author selects two civiljudgments written in English by the Hong Kong District Court judges from thewebsite of the Hong Kong Legal Information Institute as the source texts. Then theauthor briefs on and analyzes the characteristics of the source texts, elaborates thepreparation work the author has done and the difficult issues the author hasencountered while doing the translation, and carefully selects severalrepresentative sentences from the translated texts to make an analysis andsummaries with the help of Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence theory and someother appropriate translation methods and strategies.After the illustration of abundant examples, the author finds that thejudgments are featured by its preference for the use of “declarative sentences” todescribe the specific particulars and circumstances in detail disputed by the partiesto the cases. When dealing with these “declarative sentences”, the most suitabletranslation method to realize the equivalence between the source texts and thetranslated texts is literal translation, which can well convey the contents of thesource text while maintaining its stylistic style. However, any translated text cannot be100%equivalent to the source text. Sometimes we have to necessarilyconduct appropriately adding, reducing, omitting, transforming or conversion uponits contents to make it more faithful to the source text, thus achieving the equivalence between source text and target text to the greatest degree.