Translation Of Legal Academic Works From The Perspective Of Context Analysis

This report is written on the basis of the author's translation of Chapter 18 and Chapter 19 of Law Professors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law,an academic work authored by Professor Stephen Presser.This book introduces thoughts and works of a great deal of well-known American legal professors,demonstrating how these American legal professors affect American politics and society.The author selected chapters 18 and 19 of this book as the original text of the translation report.These two chapters provided an introduction to the life,thoughts,and academic research of Mary Ann Glendon,a professor at Harvard Law School,and Paul Carrington,a professor at Duke Law School.Unlike the legislative texts or business contracts,there are not so many jargons or the terms of art in this text,neither so many rigid patterns or structure,but focus more on intellectual elaboration.Thus,it is fair to say this is a typical context-dependent translation,which requires context analysis and a lot of extra-linguistic knowledge in this area,otherwise may lead to unclear translation,misunderstanding or even errors.The relevant academic "background knowledge" in American legal systems and American jurisprudential study must run through the whole process of translation.In this report,the author first introduces the background of the translation task and the legal context of the original text.Then,the author analyzes the importance of background knowledge on solving semantic difficulties and analyzing complicated sentences.By analyzing and sorting out this translation practice,the author summarizes the main difficulties and solutions in the translation of such kind of text,in order to offer a deeper understanding of the translation of legal academic works,and provide researchers and translators who works on legal academic translation some reflection and inspirations.