A Translation Report On The Judgment Of A Foreign-related Civil Case

According to Sarcevic(1997), there are mainly two types of legal instruments, namely regulatory instruments, such as legislative instruments, and descriptive and regulatory instruments such as judgments and complaints. Generally, writing and translation of the former calls for professional knowledge about laws. The latter, though also complicated and lengthy in sentences, requires much less knowledge about law and use of old English and Latin words.The author selects a civil judgment and appendix thereto and translates them into English with the purpose of understanding the language characteristics and writing styles of civil judgment. Chinese judgment often consist of four parts, namely head, main body, rulings and end. Generally, the format and content of head and end is stable, including the basic information of complaint(s), defendant(s) and judges, and naturally study on the parallel texts will be of great help to translate these two parts. Therefore, the main difficulty of the translation lies in the main body and rulings. Especially the main body contains cause of action, both parties’ claims, facts at issue, decisions made by the judges and relevant laws and regulations. Of course, the language of judgment is highly professional, which means that the most difficult problem is to find the corresponding words with equal authority in the target language. And Latin words and old English are frequently used in legal instruments. Hence, translation of judgment constitutes a great challenge to the translator’s legal translation experience and mastering of legal words and expressions.Also this translation practice has freshened the translator’s understanding of legal translation strategies and skills. Although sentences in judgment texts are lengthy and complicated, its expression modes are quite simple and its language has its own stable modes and characteristics, which means that literal translation is more suitable for legal translation so as to retain the exact meaning and legal force of the source language. Hence, according to legal translation expert Li Kexing, static translation is the most ideal strategy for legal translation. The applicability of static equivalence is argued mainly from the perspectives of stereotyped writing style, unique linguistic features, specific function of legal texts, and informative nature of the translated versions and the restricted readership of legal documents.