Report On The Translation Of Court Of Appeal Judgments Of The Dow Case

Since the 21 st century,the interaction of China and Africa has been more and more frequent.However,both common people and scholars have limited understanding of and researches on African laws,which is very disadvantaged for further development of China-Africa relations.The current researches on African laws in China are usually made from the perspective of Africa as a whole,and the researches on the law of an individual country are scarce.The Citizenship Case of Botswana has exerted a great impact on African countries and the Commonwealth.Based on the Chinese translation of two judges’ opinions of the case,the paper reviews the development of the mixed legal system of Botswana,discusses the difficulties in translating the judges’ opinions,and investigates the legal and social culture of Botswana.It is hoped that the paper can provide references for the law study of an individual African country in China.The thesis mainly analyzes the translation of the judgments from the perspectives of lexicon and syntax.Besides,different translation strategies are also put forward respectively.The difficulties like the translation of cultural-loaded words,the case names and non-equivalent words and the procedure of solving these problems by giving full play to the author’s initiative are elaborated in the thesis.Abundant precedents are cited in these judgments.Similarly,China also collects and compiles a number of guiding cases,facilitating the reaching of consensus among judges of the courts with regard to judicial opinions.The distinctiveness of this case lies in the mistakes it reflects during the development of law.China,advocating rule by law,can learn a lesson from it to improve the legal system of itself.Non-equivalent expression has long been a problem when translating legal texts.The initiative and creativity of translators are good solutions to this kind of problems,which can not only enhance the readability,but also arouse the readers’ interest of studying legal texts.Therefore,when dealing with non-equivalent expressions,translators can be creative by taking the context and legal factors into account and provide reasonable equivalent translations.