A Report On The Translation Of Chinese Court Judgment

This is a report on the translation of a Chinese court judgment. The author introduces the background and process of her translation practice, describes the problems in the translation and explains how she solved them by implementing Verschueren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory(1999).China has carried out three rounds of judicial reforms, which are crucial in upholding its social order and promoting it economic development. One of the main objectives of those reforms is to improve the transparency of judicial system, which can be achieved by enabling people in China as well as those from other countries to understand judiciary documents made by Chinese courts. Under this background, the Intermediate People’s Court of Guangzhou took the initiative by publicizing judgments in both Chinese and English versions for cases involving foreign factors on a official website.The source text in the report is a written court judgment provided by the court.The judgment, as a type of legal texts, should be translated into legal English. In the translation process, the author was constantly beset with the problem of choosing appropriate language structures. Therefore, she applied the Linguistic Adaptation Theory into her translation, which mainly explains the mechanism and motives behind language users’ choice-making. This practice report studies how the author made target linguistic choices in translating the judgment from four angles of the theory:contextual correlates of adaptability, linguistic correlates of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability, and salience of adaptation process. The author then points out findings and limitations in her report and makes suggestions for future translation practice.