A Report On Translation Of Law And Society(Chapter Five)

The book Law and Society is written by American scholar Matthew Lippman and was published by SAGE Publications,Inc.in 2015.Matthew Lippman takes an interdisciplinary and international approach that highlights the relevance of the law throughout our society in about 600 pages.Distinctive coverage of diversity,inequality,civil liberties,and globalism is intertwined through an organized theme in a strong narrative.This comprehensive study provides readers with a better understanding of the mutual relations between law and society.The author of this report has translated Chapter Five and Glossary which contain 30,000 words from English to Chinese.This report is a review and summary of the translation practice of 10,000 words from which some examples are selected for analysis.Faithfulness,Expressiveness and Elegance are basic principles of translation which offers guidance for most translation practice,although they are still indistinct and needs to be crystallized in translation.Thus,while working on the project,the author adopted the text typology of Katharina Reiss as the theoretical framework which covers three main functions of the different text types,namely,the informative function,the expressive function and the operative function.The original text may be classified as the Informative type whose linguistic function is to convey the message(show matters and facts).Featuring the strong logicality,the focus is on the content rather than the form,and the translation method is to clarify the original meanings by in plain language.In view of the translation principles,the author comes up with a translation concept: faithfulness--delivering the original message loyally;expressiveness--clarifying the meaning in plain language;and elegance—reflecting he logicality of informative text and the formality in the register of the legal and academic language.The whole process of translation is under the guidance of this concept.This report consists of four sections.The first section talks about the source of the translation task and the significance of the translation work.The second section focuses on the preparation and the first draft and the revised version.In the third section,the author selected25 typical examples to illustrate the clarification,logicalization and standardization during translation.And the last section reviews the problems,solutions and the inspirations from this translation practice.