A Practice Report On The Translation Of Electronic Commerce Law

Owing to the acceleration of globalization, no matter in politics, economics or culture, distant corners in world are becoming unprecedentedly closer than before. Law has been playing an important role in global communication, it provides protections for international communication. As what is witnessed by the whole globe, electronic commerce has developed so fast and has exerted influence all around the world, nevertheless, our national electronic commerce has lagged behind due to the imperfection of electronic commerce legal system. Legal translation contributes much to the further development of national electronic commerce and pushes forward the legal system as well as the better understanding to each others’ rules so as to benefit the countries involved. Legal materials are featured with legal terminologies and formal legal vocabularies, which share the characters of accuracy, stationarity and simplification. Electronic Commerce Law belongs to legal text which is objective and precise. Translation is regarded as a process of decoding and recoding, which is a kind of specially “purposeful behavior” of human(Nord, 2001:11). Intended communicative purposes nurture specific translation strategies, meanwhile the translation purposes also decide translation type and target text. The thesis discusses legal translation under the guidance of skopos theory and its three rules, by which target text is faithful to source text both in content and style to a large degree; besides, skopos theory provides the translation of legal text with theoretical and practical guidance.On the basis of skopos theory and its three rules, the thesis makes attempts to solve the following three problems:Firstly, how to ensure specific features of legal language such as preciseness, normalization and conciseness in legal translation?Secondly, how to solve the difficulties in translating legal text on account of different culture backgrounds and language customs between original language and target language.Thirdly, how to realize the equivalent function and effect between source text and target text when translating the legal text?Under the guidance of skopos theory and its three rules, the thesis solves difficulties in translation practice from following three aspects:In the first place, on lexical level, the thesis applies the translation skills, such as combination of synonyms, use of formal words and the transformation of dynamic Chinese into static English to deal with lexical translation.In the second place, on syntactic level, the thesis introduces the translation skills such as transforming active structure into passive structure and the application of complex sentences to make the target legal text into full play.At last, on textual level the thesis analyzes two translation skills: transforming loose structure into compact structure and achieving the coherence in micro structure.The thesis states that special function of legal text requires the translator to take the function and purpose of translation text into full account and have an intimate knowledge about features of legal text. Under the guidance of skopos theory and its three rules, a better translation work can be achieved with application of appropriate translation skills respectively on the basis of lexical, syntactic and textual features as well as the repetitive legal translation practices, which can absolutely facilitate the translated text to be more understandable for the target language readers.