On The Mistranslation Of Attributive Clauses In Legal Translation

This report is based on Entrepreneurial Litigation: Its Rise,Fall,and Future,written by professor John C.Coffee Jr.in 2015 and,so far,there has been no Chinese version of it.This book involves a significant number of famous class action cases that have marked their footprints in American legal history.The introduction and translation of it into Chinese will be essentially helpful for us to learn the class action in a Chinese context and conducive to settling group disputes in China.In the process of translating several parts of this book,this author has handled abundant English attributive clauses.Among all the clause types in English,the attributive clause is one of the most widely-used and complex-structured that have long baffled English learners.This author has increasingly realized the prominent role that this type of clause has played in English writing and its corresponding Chinese translations due to the difference between the English and Chinese attributive clauses.In this report,the author cast reflections on the translation problems of the English attributive clause in this law book.Upon a detailed analysis of its corresponding Chinese translation,the author has found three types of prominent mistranslations of the English clauses,i.e.translators' singular translation skills,little knowledge on the clause's function and lack of logic coherence in their Chinese translations.To deal with those issues,this report gives its suggestions based on rich empirical studies.Hopefully,it will guide other translators in the translation of law literature.