| With the deepening of economic globalization,bilateral and multilateral trade and cooperation are being undertaken by members of the international community.The transactions of business have undergone a stage of radical transformation from traditional person to person interactions to virtual digital contract formation.In order to make sure that business are operated in a fair and square manner and solutions can be found when disputes arise,a common set of laws and regulations shall be established.The common law system is recognized as the default standard when signing contracts on an international stage,and it is imperative as well as initiative to understand the rules with regard to the aspects of cyber law.One way to comprehend the different linguistic cultures is through the process of translation.Since the reform and opening up of China,more and more legal documents are being translated into Chinese,but due to the different natures of the two legal systems,linguistic equivalence become quite an issue for translators to tackle.Cyber Law: what you need to know about doing business online is authored by Prof.David Johnston,a prominent Canadian law professor,McGill and University of Waterloo President and a former Governor General of Canada.He is president of Harvard University's Board of Overseers and chair of the Canadian government's Information Highway Advisory Council.The book can be divided into 11 chapters and mainly guides us towards the understanding of digital law and electronic commerce.The selected text of the translation project is Chapter 8 and Chapter 9.Chapter 8(Contracts)deals with an simple concept: a promise made between two parties to do something for value,creating legal rights and obligations for the obligor and oblige and this chapter introduces an easier marriage between electronic commerce and cyber-law in the area of contracts,and shed light on the parties involved;Chapter 9(Tort Liability)discusses what happens in the legal field when something goes wrong,what kind of remedies will be applied in tort cases and this chapter also focuses on the predictability an d enforceability's precarious co-existence in the area of tort law.A flexible and fair dispute settlement shall be established until a new equilibrium sets in.Due to the specific and unique features of legal English,general translation theories could not be completely suitable under the discourse,therefore,it is imperative to apply a set of translation principles regarding legal English context.In consideration of the above analysis,this translation report refers to the legal translation theory proposed by Susan Sarcevic.Under the guidance of “legal English is an act of communication within the mechanism of the law”,the translator took text typology into consideration,and collected a good amount of examples to show the application of the relative translation approaches,by comparing and contrasting the different versions of translation,the systematic methods can be concluded through practical work: Literal translation is suitable for legal terminology while free translation can reduce the abstract sense in metaphors.Also in order to facilitate the cognition of target readers,addition and annotation are used to enrich the information.When conducting legal English translation,the translator needs to bear the unique features of legal English in mind such as common words with uncommon meanings and the use of borrowing words,and takes responding approaches to improve the accuracy and authenticity of the target text.Besides,the syntactic feature of legal English shall be considered and turning passive voice into active voice or rearrange sentence structure can help the transferring from trans-coding to communication. |
PDF Full Text Request