An English-Chinese Translation Of The Frequently Asked Questions In Court Jury Service On The Website Of Massachusetts Court System And A Report On The Translation

The jury system is a remarkable and dynamic institution.Its unique development process,strong vitality and embodied idea of the people's democracy can be used for references to the construction of rule of law,the reform of the judicial system and the implementation of advancing law-based governance in all fields in China,Based on the knowledge relevant to the jury system,the author cooperated with the other members of a related translation team to jointly conduct the English-Chinese translation of the website of Massachusetts Court System.The author was responsible for the translation of Frequently Asked Questions in Court Jury Service under the column "Jury Information" on the website,which deals with some frequently asked questions before,at and after court jury service.Besides,some informative texts on the website,such as Delinquency,Disqualifications,Source and Summoning of Jurors,the Office of Jury Commissioner,Trail&Grand Jurors,as well as some laws and regulations concerning the jury system were also translated to provide readers with a general understanding of the system.And in the translation project some legal terms initiated or recommended by the author's supervisor Professor Hu Zhaoyun are adopted,such as "???" for "jury","???" for "juror","??" for "verdict","??" for "summons","??" for "panel","??" for "impanel/impanelment".There are two main objectives of the translation project:one is to popularize the relevant knowledge of the jury system;the second is to conclude the characteristics of legal English and webpage English and explore the translation strategies and techniques of legal English and webpage English with selected examples based on the original English text and the author's Chinese version.Legal English has its own characteristics among various types of texts,such as its legal terms of art and legal jargons,polysemy,nominalization,etc.,which brings more challenges to legal English translation and is worthy of a further study.Based on the text,literal translation and foreignization are mainly employed in the project.Specifically,conversion,simplification and omission,inversion as well as division are mainly utilized to tackle with the difficulties appeared in legal English translation.With the growing development of networkization and informationization,the webpage of major systems has become an important channel for publicity.The unique features of webpage English lie in the layout of webpages,the headings and subheadings of webpages and the linguistic as well as lexical features of webpages.The author explores the translation of numbers,headings and subheadings as well as modifiers in webpages.Through the translation project,the author hopes to provide some references for other legal English translation and webpage English translation.