The Translation Of Abstract Nouns,V-ing Structure And Complex Passive Sentences In Legal Documents

The report is based on the translation(EN-CN)practice of Status of Arab Women Report: Access to Justice for Women and Girls in the Arab Region: From Ratification to Implementation of International Instruments(Chapters 1-3).The source text in English is a legal report,concerning with Arab women's access to justice.It is formally styled and clearly structured with many nominal structures and passive sentences.Based on the textual analysis of the source report,in the central part of this paper,the author discusses three difficulties in this translation practice: abstract nouns,V-ing structure and passive sentences.During translation of abstract nouns,the ways applied transformation of parts of speech,additional translation of verbs,addition of subject.In this way,the translation is similar to the expression of native Chinese speakers.Then during the translation of V-ing structure,according to its syntactic function,it is necessary to translate V-ing structure into sentences or to modulate the sentence pattern.Besides,the typical characteristic of legal text is the massive use of passive sentences,which are usually complex sentences.They can be classified into the passive sentences with agent and the passive sentences with no agent.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics,the author tried to translate them into Chinese sentences with grammatical markers or without grammatical markers.The source text is a legal document,and the issues the discussed in the cases are typical problems during the process of legal document translation.Hopefully,the study could provide experience for legal document translation.