A Report On The Translation Project Of Conflict Law:the Influence Of New Weapons Technology, Human Rights And Emerging Actors(Chapter 6)

The source text(hereinafter referred as ST) in this translation project is the chapter 6 of Conflict Law:The Influence of New Weapons Technology, Human Rights and Emerging Actors. The author is Dr William H Boothby who is a retired air commodore and former deputy director of legal services in the Royal Air Force(RAF), UK. This book has been written with the explicit purpose of expressing the author’s personal views on particular matters that he regards as being of great importance in the part of international law that deals with conflict. The chapter 6 of this book focuses on the features of future conducts of war and their implications.The significant topic of this translation project is selected due to the factors stated in the overall introduction of the project which includes its background, objectives and significance. The source text is classified as an informative text under the guidance of the text type theory. And the translation difficulties are summarized through analyzing the typical writing style of the author, the content and linguistic characteristics of the ST. There are two main difficulties that are how to accurately understand and represent the contextual meanings, those of technical terms included, of the source text within the semantic scope of the target language; how to properly deal with the long syntactical structures of the ST according to the syntactical rules and using habits of the target language. By applying the communicative and the semantic translation method of Peter Newmark, the translator has explored the contextual meanings of the ST by selecting the most faithful meanings when the word of ST is a polyseme and by the analysis of the underlying lexical meaning of the ST. Two translation skills of reversion and division are used to process the long syntactical structures with a purpose of transmitting the contextual meaning of the ST as closely as syntactical structure of the target language allow. In this translation project, while the translator has learned new translation skills, there are some limitations remaining to be improved. The result of this project is expected to be helpful for the domestic study of relevant subjects.