A Report On The Translation Of Electronic Commerce Act(2002)

This is a report about the translation based on the English version of Electronic Commerce Act(2002),which is enacted by the government of Republic of Malta.It is a law,related to various actions of the electronic commerce industry,and is formulated to resolve problems arising therefrom.As a typical legislative text,the source text is characterized with professional legal terms,loan words and phrases and,complex sentences,which share the characters of accuracy,objectiveness and strictness.In translation,the difficulties the translator faced include lexical gap and conditional sentences of complex sentences.Considering the differences between English and Chinese in legislation,translation methods and techniques the translator used were proposed.Specifically,under the guidance of the skopos theory,literal translation and liberal translation are used to tackle the lexical gap,while division,linear translation and synthesis are adopted to translate the conditional sentences of complex sentences,so as to ensure equivalence in effect and in meaning between source text and target text.The translator hopes that this translation report will be taken as a reference for other translators when similar translation practice is conducted in the future.