A Report On Translating Criminal Judgment In A Drug Smuggling Case

Despite its long history and abundant practices, translation of criminal judgments entered into by Chinese courts has not been widely studied because of its characteristics of confidentiality, special domain and limited publicity, etc. However, studies in this area are significant not only to legal translators but also to legal practitioners, even to the justice system. In order to study judgment texts, the author translated this drugs-smuggling criminal judgment, to compare the second draft and the third draft translation from the perspective of speech act theory with reference to relevant judgments of Anglo- American countries and to suggest some advice, so as to intensify the quality control of judgment translation.Based on the practice of rendering drugs-smuggling judgments, with approximately 14,000 Chinese characters, this report firstly examines the translation strategies of criminal judgments from the perspectives of lexis, syntax and text. Then based on Austin's and Searle's Speech Act Theory(SAT) as theoretical framework, as well as the Legal Equivalence(LE) as translation criterion, it focuses on the lexical level to analyze the speech act in judgments, and to addresses the differences between speech act in legal text and general speech act which mainly lie in the legal effects the speech act produces.Through this translation project, the author firstly hopes to learn more about features of judgments; secondly, to gain a profound understanding of speech act in legal judgments and to find some translation issues and provide solutions accordingly, and wishes to maintain the equivalence between the Chinese-English translation of judgment texts to a great extent, thus making certain contributions to the translation and research of legal judgment texts.