Translation Strategies Based On Text Types:Some Reflections On The Translation Of Free Culture

When translating English legal texts into Chinese, translators often find the peculiarities revealed in the system of either continental law or Anglo-American law equally challenging, compared to those language barriers. Moreover, the type diversity of information in a specific legal text may increase the difficulty of English-Chinese legal translation. In the process of legal translation, it is also necessary and important to consider how to cope with the information of different text types. The author of the present paper has reached an understanding about it when translating excerpts from Free Culture.How to handle the related information of different text types was one of the major difficulties the author was faced with during the process of translating of Free Culture. To deal with this specific problem, the author reviewed the literature about text type theories in translation studies and made references to the research of Peter Newmark and Catharine Reiss in particular. Then the author categorized the text types in Free Culture into two major ones, informative legal text and influential legal text, and used different translation strategies accordingly. For informative legal text, the author familiarized legal terms and legal knowledge, and for influential legal text, the author used professional and authoritative expressions and explanation. The author considers that translation strategies can only be meaningful and most effective when used in specific text types. And in translation practice, the translator can choose the most appropriate strategy if he or she is absolutely certain about the text type of the information in the source text.