A Practice Report On The Chinese Translation Of Anglo-american Intellectual Property Judgments Under Information Theory

In November 2019,the general offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China(CPC)and the State Council jointly issued a directive,calling for intensified protection of intellectual property(IP)rights.The directive proposes to “improve the early warning and prevention mechanism for overseas IP disputes,strengthen the follow-up research of major cases,and establish a dynamic follow-up mechanism of foreign intellectual property law revisions”.Case law is an important component of the Anglo-American legal system.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct and study the translation of Anglo-American judgments of representative intellectual property cases.This report,based on the Chinese translation of the judgment of Lawrence GOLAN,et al.,Petitioners v.Eric H.HOLDER,Jr.,Attorney General,et al.,aims to uncover strategies to the typical problems under the guidance of information theory.IP judgment has its unique functions and linguistic features,which cause the following typical problems in the translation process.(1)Lexical level: there are legal rules or cultural information omitted in the translation process,causing difficulty in the understanding of the target text;modal verbs are frequently used in the judgment,but it is difficult to convey the enabling norm,obligatory norm,and prohibitive norm of the legal text according to the translation of these modal verbs.(2)Syntactic level:as long and difficult sentences and obscure logical relationships are commonly seen in the original text,literal translation obscures the logic;there are many omissions in the original text,leading to inadequate transmission of information in translation.(3)Cultural level: the problem of culture default occurs.According to the information theory,in the process of information transmission,different channel capacities exist between target readers and original readers.Literal translation will cause overloaded information and narrow channels,making the translation difficult to understand,so that the information cannot be sufficiently delivered to the target readers.Based on information theory,making information more explicit by means of amplification and easier for readers to understand.Specifically:in terms of the lexical level,supplementing the interpretation of legal terms and the extending meaning of modal verbs in the legal context;at the syntactic level,adding logical words or adverbs and omitted contents;and as for the cultural level,complementing the law-related cultural background knowledge.The report is expected to provide references for the Chinese translation of judgments in intellectual property cases,so as to improve the translation quality and efficiency of similar texts.