Shifts In Chinese-english Translation Of Intellectual Property Judgments: An Information-bridge Perspective

With deepened globalization,China has increased its legal exchanges with the international community.As for the protection of intellectual property,there is an increasing appeal to protecting intellectual property worldwide.Transnational intellectual property disputes caused by multilateral trade transactions can be found almost everywhere.Therefore,it is extremely important to promote the exchange of IPrelated laws between China and the outside world.Translation shifts are common in various translation activities.At present,the studies on translation shifts mainly focus on theories and literary translation.There are a few studies on translation shifts concentrating on judgments.This study explores shifts in Chinese-English translation of IP judgments from the perspective of information bridges.Therefore,the author raises three research questions: 1.How are translation shifts manifested in Chinese-English translation of IP judgments? 2.What are the influencing factors of these translation shifts? 3.To what extent are translation shifts acceptable in Chinese-English translation of IP judgments?The author selects six Chinese IP judgments and their corresponding English versions,which are tagged according to legal discourse information analysis and compared in terms of information elements.This study firstly figures out the specific manifestations of translation shifts in IP judgments.At the micro information level,it is found that the changes of information elements can be classified into four types: information deletion,information addition,information substitution and information rearrangement.At the macro language level,translation shifts are manifested in lexical,syntactic and textual aspects.Based on information bridges model,through further analysis,this study points out that the main factors affecting translation shifts lie in socio-cultural systems such as ideologies,differences between Chinese and English linguistic conventions and legal assumptions under different legal systems.In the end,this study discusses the properness of translation shifts and quotes the principle of information equivalence to assess translation shifts.This study can provide some useful implications for the translation practice and translation quality assessment of judgments.