Translation Report For Notes And Commentaries On Chinese Criminal Law

Adversative is a conjunction which reflects a relation of transition. It plays a significant role in discourse structure and cohesion. One of the differences between English and Chinese in language structure is that English is a synthetic language while Chinese is an analytic one. The former tends to apply conjunctions in sentence cohesion, while the latter tends to rely on the logic relation in sentences, with no or few conjunctions. Because the legal English discourse and legal Chinese discourse are originated from ordinary language, they need to follow rules of each language, and adversative of legal language is no exception. Therefore, English-Chinese translation reflects in the conjunction translation to a certain extent, in which the translation of adversatives is most important. In English legal translation, if we translate adversatives into Chinese directly without any modification, the whole translation will be filled with westernized sentences, or even be mistranslated, and will be understood with difficulty by Chinese readers, because the way of writing is against their modes of thinking. Because of the explicitness and implicitness of adversatives, the author suggests there are four techniques in their translation: implicitation of the explicit adversatives, explicitation of the explicit adversatives, implicitation of the implicit adversatives and explicitation of the implicit adversatives. In this way, while ensuring that the meaning is properly and precisely transferred to the readers, the translation will properly conform to the Chinese readers’ way of expression.