Report On The Translation Of Letters To A Law Student:A Guide To Studying Law At University(Excerpts)

The source text for the present translation practice is selected from Letters to a Law Student by Nicholas J.McBride,professor at Cambridge's Law School.In the two letters selected,McBride systematically lectures on how to embark the journey of legal studies and illustrates how to overcome staged difficulties in the first letter,and introduces a great many essential legal concepts in the second letter.With this translation practice,the author hopes to be able to deepen her understanding about and improve her competence in translating of epistolary legal texts by solving problems that arose in the translation process,and,meanwhile,to demonstrate how relevant translation theories could play their guiding role in her translation practice.This translation report focuses on the discussion of the translation of typical legal vocabulary,sentence structures and discourse structures found in the two letters.During the translation process,five major translation problems were encountered,to wit,the translating of legalese,legal usage of ordinary words in legal context,and passive voice constructions,the use of conversion and structural transformation skills,and the translating of long sentences,all of which are resolved under the guidance of semantic and communicative translation put forward by Peter Newmark and by the employment of other translation methods.Since these problems are typical and common for legal translation learners,the author hopes that her reflections on those problems could,to some extent,help them in their study and practice.