A Report On The E-C Translation Of English Case Briefs Under Skopos Theory: A Case Study Of IP Case Briefs

Essential to the development of case law is the publication and indexing of judgments of cases by judges in the form of law reports.A case brief is a condensed,concise outline-form summary of a law report.Among previous studies of law,little attention has been given to the E-C translation of case briefs,a legal text unique to countries of the common law tradition.The research is dedicated to examining the E-C translation of intellectual property case briefs,summarizing the problems identified in the translation process and to proposing solutions to the problems.As a professional and informative legal text,case briefs are featured with terminologies in different fields,long sentences with complex structures or passive voice and intra-textual coherence through the text,thus posing many difficulties to translation.In line with the language features of case briefs and under the Skopos theory,a number of instructive solutions are adopted to address the problems identified:(1)on the lexical level,literal translation and zero translation are adopted to tackle the translation of terminologies;(2)on the syntactical level,division is used to translate long sentences,sequential translation is used to deal with long sentences with similar structures with Chinese and passive voice is maintained in passive sentences;(3)on the textual level,grammatical cohesion and verbal cohesion are maintained for strengthening the intra-textual coherence,while omission is used to avoid redundancy in the target text.