A Translation Report On The Judicial Assessment Of Expert Evidence

As a special translation activity, legal translation is limited by law and the characteristics of legal language; it has its own principles. This report explores the characteristics of legal text and strategies of legal translation. The source text is selected from The Judicial Assessment of Expert Evidence. As a legal treatise, the book focuses on analysis and research of expert evidence theory and expert witness system in Anglo-American law system.“The Skopos theory” is chosen as the main guiding theory of this report. As an important theory in the functional school of translation studies, Skopos theory focuses on translation as an activity with an aim or purpose. The translator should put the intended function of the target language as the ultimate goal, and choose the optimized translation strategies on the basis of the analysis of the source text. Legal translation is not only a behavior of word transformation, but it is all about activities between different legal systems. For the purpose of passing and sending information, the translator should put the translation goal in the first place. What’s more, he/she should have a good mastery of basic legal knowledge and facts in order to implement accurate knowledge conversion in legal level.On the basis of analysis of detailed cases, the author lists certain typical problems and challenges occurred during the translation process and offers strategies accordingly.The author describes the meanings of the selected topic, and analyses the characteristics of the source language. The preparation of background knowledge, the selection of translation tools and the control of translation duration and quality have also been discussed in this report. For the overall translation management process, the author follows the “the sequential model of translation for training purposes” proposed by Professor Daniel Gile in his book Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training. Furthermore, the translation examples listed in the report mainly fall on legal lexical level and syntactical level. As for the lexical level, emphasis is put on the translation of legal terms, the search strategies and the translation method of “shall”. The analysis on syntactical level mainly involves the translation strategies of long andcomplex sentences in legal texts.