A Report On The Translation Of Law And Society (Chapter 7)

This report is based on the author's English-Chinese translation practice and the translation material is excerpted from the seventh chapter of Law and Society, “Criminal Courts”. The chapter has more than 10,000 words in total, of which about 6,000 words are included in this report. Law and Society is a social science book written by Professor Matthew Lippman in UIC and published by the SAGE press in the year of 2015, and the seventh chapter describes the contemporary American criminal courts in detail.The translation theory which was employed for the translation task is the text typology of Katharina Reiss, a famous German translation theorist. According to her, there are three text types, which are the informative type, the creative type and the operative type. The translation material of this practice belongs to the informative type, therefore the domesticating translation strategy was mainly adopted in order to make the translation fit for the taste of target language readers. In addition, the foreignizing translation strategy was also involved in this practice. All in all, the domestication method predominates over the foreignization method in translating this translation material.There are three translation difficulties the translator came across with during the translation, and they include long and difficult sentences, legal English and figurative expressions. Division method was adopted to deal with long and difficult sentences. There are four difficult aspects in translating legal English, which are the general words with specific meaning in the legal context, legal terminology, loan words in legal English and legal professional knowledge. And the domesticating translation strategy was employed to cope with the translation of the figurative expressions. What's more, skills of amplification, omission, inversion, conversion and affirmation were used to make Chinese translation smooth and fluent.Two shortcomings of the translator were found during the translating process. Firstly, the translator was short of knowledge supply in some specialized field. There still exists many flaws in the translation due to the translator's lack of legal professional knowledge. Secondly, the translator's language competence was not solid enough to translate between Chinese and English freely and fluently. The translation can not reach a relatively high standard. The translator's professional knowledge and comprehensive qualities in translation should be upgraded in order to make up for these shortcomings in her further career.