Translation Of Legal Terminologies

With the widening spread and quickening pace of globalization,China has more and more exchanges with other countries in the legal field.In this process,the translation of a typical judgment that delivers the value of even protecting the human rights of criminals can build a bridge for foreign countries,especially the common law countries,to know more about China’s progress and achievements in building its country under the rule of law,so as to promote the image of China as a socialist country under the rule of law in the international community.The translation material selected is a retrial criminal judgment that corrected the mistakes of the courts of original instances in the aspect of fact-finding and procedure.With more than 40,000 words,the judgment contains a large number of legal terms,which can be divided into four categories from the aspect of the law:terms related to document citations,legal institutions,criminal charges,and legal personnel.This report aims at exploring how to translate these four types of legal terms more authentically and accurately with the purpose of promoting the translation of judicial documents in China.Through the project,the author holds that the translation of terms related to legal citations could be addressed by transliteration with an annotation.Among the terms related to legal personnel,alternative equivalents in the target legal system would be a good choice provided that the terms are not relatively unique in the Chinese legal system.As for the translation of legal institutions,literal translation with an explanation necessarily would be adequate to avoid misunderstandings.Legal terminologies related to criminal charges can be tackled by using neutral terms or descriptive explanations to express the charges of the source text.