Translation Project For Conditional Sentences In Legal English And Their English-Chinese Translation Methods

There are a lot of conditional sentences in the Agreement on cooperation in thesea fisheries sector between the European Community and the Islamic Republic ofMauritania (hereinafter referred to “the Agreement”). Through translating theAgreement, the author has found that a conditional sentence is an important part inthis Agreement. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss the conditional sentence and itstranslating methods systematically.English attaches importance to form cohesion, while Chinese attachesimportance to meaning consistency. So when we translate the legal English, wealways tend to translate an explicit English conditional sentence into an implicitChinese conditional sentence so as to meet the readers’ reading habits. In this report,the writer has divided the English legal conditional sentences into explicit and implicitconditional sentences. The explicit conditional sentence is a sentence which isconducted by an explicit conditional word. And according to the analysis of thegrammar structure, we can know that the implicit conditional sentence is a sentencewith the conditional meanings. This report mainly summarizes and discusses theEnglish-Chinese translation of the Agreement through methods of literal translationand free translation. When we translate the legal English, we would rather choose theliteral translation. When the literal translation cannot express the meaning wholly, wecan use the method of free translation to help translate. The best way to translate is tocombine the method of free translation and literal translation together.