A Chinese Translation Of Chapters7,8and9of The American Jury Systern And Reflections On The Translation

The jury system is an important part of the American judicial system. The author of this thesis, guided by her supervisor, applying what she has learned about translation to this project, translates chapters7,8and9of The American Jury System by Professor Randolph N. Jonakait, and presents reflections on this translation project from the background of the project, the standardization of terms and the translation techniques applied. During the translation process, in order to express the English text in Chinese more accurately, the author translates legal terms such as "jury","juror","verdict","hung jury","instruction" and "jury pool" into“决认团”,“决认员”,“威定”,“悬挂决认团”,“提示”and“决认团池”respectively, as was initiated or advocated by my supervisor Professor Hu Zhaoyun. After finishing the translation, the author discusses the retranslation and standardization of some terms with her supervisor and partners, holding that it is necessary to retranslate some terms mistranslated before and that the same terms should be consistently translated throughout the whole text. The author analyzes some translation difficulties and techniques, through typical cases, in terms of the translation of words and phrases, including equivalent translation, addition, the flexibility of word translation in specific contexts, conversion, translation with four-character structures, transformation, generalization, concretization and the like. The translation of long sentences is also discussed for different situations such as mixed sentences, sentences containing several adverbial clauses of condition, long attributive clauses and long modifiers, comparative sentences, long complex sentences, and different translation methods are applied correspondingly, mainly including sequence alteration, separation and the application of four-character structures. The author also sums up the lessons and experience drawn from her translation project and realizes that the principles for legal translation are that the translator should be very rigorous, keep close to the original text and give priority to literal translation. After reviewing the whole process of the translation, the author further recognizes that whatever texts one translates, the most important is to enhance his or her bilingual competence so as to make faithful conversion between two languages.