Report On Translating Court Rulings On Applications For Recognition And Enforcement Of Foreign Arbitral Awards In China

The two court rulings selected for this translation practice were entered by the Intermediate People’s Court of Guangzhou(“IPCG”) against such background. They contain the claims of both parties, relevant evidence, applicable rules and decisions of the court.The objectives of this thesis are two-fold: to report on the process of translating this type of Chinese court rulings into proper English, and to reflect on the successes and failures experienced in the process of carrying out the translation task in terms of lexical choice, syntactic refinement and discoursal arrangement so as to provide some applicable strategies for and suitable approaches to the processing of such legal documents. To accomplish the first objective, this report introduces the whole process of the translation task in details, which consists of four sub-processes, covering the source of the translation task, the specific arrangement after accepting the translation task and the completion of the translation as well as the conclusion. To satisfy the second objective, the author has discussed and shared, in the form of case analysis, some of her own experience on the translation of this type of legal texts when processing legal lexical items, choice of sentence patterns and discoursal re-arrangement, which she hopes would be helpful to other translators and other people alike performing similar types of legal translation. At the lexical level, the author introduced the principles the translator should follow when translating proper names, legal terms and modal verbs. At the syntactic level, strategies and approaches including static equivalence and literal translation were discussed. At the discourse level, the author found that following the principles especially consistency and identity can make the translation better and the translation process more efficient. It is believed that these applicable strategies and approaches will shed light on the translation of Chinese civil court rulings in particular and the translation of legal documents from Chinese to English at large.