Characteristics And Strategies For Translating Legal Texts

The report selects parts 40 and 41 of Title 27 of the Code of Federal Regulations(50 volumes)published by the U.S.Government Publications Office in April 2017—Alcohol,Tobacco products,and Firearms.The parts contain current regulations issued by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau,Department of the Treasury,and the Bureau of Alcohol,Tobacco,Firearms,and Explosives,Department of Justice,as of April 1,2017.It is a legal text and the frequent uses of terms and complicated sentences are features of such text and therefore it is not an easy task to accurately translate the English legal text into Chinese and meet the legal language specification.This report will elaborate on some difficulties encountered during the translation process and provide some suggestions on how to solve them.The main content of this report is divided into four chapters.Chapter One is task description,which includes introduction and the overview of the source text.Introduction elaborates on the problems in current legal translation and the significance of this task.The overview of the source text contains the background,the publisher and the features of the source text.Chapter Two describes the task process,which includes the pre-translation preparation,implementation of the translation plans.translation quality control and glossary building.Chapter Three is a case study which includes two parts.Its first part introduces the lexical features and strategies for translating legal text,including the use of special meaning of common words,old English,terminology,words of French origin,words of broad meaning,word pairing and modal verbs.The second part introduces the syntactic features and strategies for translating legal text,including typical sentence patterns,passive voice and attributive clauses in legal texts.Chapter Four is the conclusion of the report,which includes major findings of the English-Chinese legal text translation,limitations of the report,and the suggestions for future studies.Through the report,the translator has a more systematic understanding of the characteristics of legal texts,and at the same time has accumulated experience in the translation of legal texts,which will provide some guidance for future legal translation practice.