Translation Methods Of Long Sentences In Legal Texts: A Report On The E-C Translation Of Maritime Law(Excerpt)

Translating long sentences has always been an essential part in the field of English-Chinese translation.One of the features of legal texts is the abundance of long sentences.Based on the method of case study,this thesis takes part of Maritime Law(4th edition),edited by Yvonne Baatz,as the source texts with the intention to explore and summarize the methods of long sentence translation in legal texts.This thesis mainly consists of four parts.The first part makes a brief introduction of the translation project.It presents the background of the project and analyses the features of the source text.Besides,this part shows the significance of the translation task and the detailed translation process.The second part focuses on principles of legal translation and difficulties in translating long sentences of legal texts.Firstly,the part presents different scholars' opinions on principle of legal translation.Based on these opinions and the features of the source text,the author adopts four principles for this translation task.Then,the definition of the length of long sentence is discussed in this part.Furthermore,this part illustrates the difficulties in translating long sentences of legal texts.The third part gives a description of four methods most frequently used in the translation task by the author.The four methods are adjustment of original sequence,amplification or omission,usage of punctuations and synthetic translation,each method with several typical examples and corresponding analyses.The final part is the conclusion.It summarizes the findings and implications from author's application of the four translation methods.The innovation of this thesis is presented in this part too,that is,summarizing some translation methods of long sentence in legal texts under certain specific circumstances,which might be useful for other translators while tackling long sentences.Meanwhile,some suggestions of long sentence translation of legal texts are mentioned in the final part.