A Project Report On The English Translation Of Measures Of Wuxi Municipality On Protecting Against And Mitigating Earthquake Disasters

With the progressing of Jiangsu's legislative undertaking in recent year, the local people's governments at all levels in Jiangsu Province have successively launched the translation of local regulations and rules, which provides legal support for the foreign exchanges and cooperation of the province. Based on the English translation of Measures of Wuxi Municipality on Protecting Against and Mitigating Earthquake Disasters and the major issues and difficulties in the translation process, the report is intended to verify the applicability of certain theories and principles in legal translation and provide reference for future study and practice.Focused on the translation practice, the report first unfolds the stylistic features of legislative documents in terms of formalness, precision and fuzziness, and syntactic features. Centering on the major issues and difficulties including how to maintain consistency of textual style, translation of law words and featured expressions, and rendering of "De (?)" structures, the report probes into the causes and corresponding solutions. In the report,the author first puts forward that "functional equivalence" should be the guideline in legal translation, which is intended to achieve equivalent legal effects on the basis of linguistic conversion. Specifically, in the translation process, legal translators should make proper use of formal expressions, archaic words and fixed structures so as to ensure consistency of textual styles between the source and target texts.Besides, the principles of precision and consistency and identity should be observed in translating law words and featured expressions by referring to the study on relevant documents and their translations. When necessary, legal translators can give full play to their creativity, adopting various translation strategies like creation in lexicon and change of word, phrase and clause orders as long as they can help render the expressions with Chinese characteristics and "De (?)" structures effectively.