A Translation Project Report On The Law Of Sex Discrimination(Excerpts)

The original texts of this English-Chinese project report are from the fourth edition of The Law of Sex Discrimination,a legal textbook in America co-edited by Beth Anne Wolfson,Carla M.Palumbo,J.Ralph Lindgren and Nadine Taub,which was published by Wadsworth,Cengage Learning in 2010.There are nine chapters in The Law of Sex Discrimination.The excerpts in this translation report are selected from the first chapter,which mainly introduces some historical events related to the discrimination towards women and elaborates certain laws affecting the social status of women and their development backgrounds,which provides a foundation for the exploration of sex discrimination and the relevant legal changes in the future.The translation materials in this report are legal texts with professional language,that is,precise in terms and rigorous in syntax.In addition,many early documents with different syntactic structure from modern English cited in the original texts,so that it makes the texts even more difficult to understand and translate.Therefore,before translating,the translator has read some parallel texts and backgrounds materials related to sex discrimination and sex equality in order to understand the translation materials better.What is more,the translator has organized some legal terminologies in advance.There are several difficulties in this translation project.At first,It is not easy to understand some specialized words and complicated sentences.In addition,the legal language style is more difficult to properly express in Chinese.Moreover,the lack of background knowledge plays a negative role in understanding the original text.Therefore,the translator abides by functional equivalence theory proposed by Eugene A.Nida to guide the whole translation and adopts some translation techniques such as amplification,omission and repetition so as to tackle the difficulties in translation.By finishing this translation project,the translator has reached a deeper understanding about the characteristics of the translation----"dancing with shackles".It is necessary for a good translation to maintain the original text information and language style and strive to meet the reading habits of target language readers by decreasing translationese,which requires higher language level for translator about two languages.In the process of translation,the translator has accumulated some translation experience,especially in the translation of legal texts,which has helped the translator to realize some shortcomings when doing the translation and make a remarkable progress in translation ability.