A Report On The Translation Of The Fourth Chapter Of Winning Arguments

This report,built upon the translation of the Chapter 4,Legal Argument of Winning Arguments,analyzes the whole translation process.Winning Arguments,written by Stanley Fish,an American literary theorist,legal scholar,was published by Harper publisher in July,2016.Winning Arguments is actually not an instruction book about how to win arguments,it is a scholarly book,discussing “argument” in different scenarios,instead.While,Chapter 4 explains how the legal process works,what can be taken as evidences,the feature of law,and the definition of fiction.Besides,the author also shares his perspectives on the distinction between speech and act.Different criminal law models are introduced and their distinctions are compared.At last,the author shares what the law’s arguments leave out and why the law has to ignore emotional stories behind each case.In the report,the translator introduces some basic information of the author and the source text,and explores language features of source text as well as challenging factors of translation.Before translation,the translator reads the source text for three times to figure out the author’s ideas.In the process of translation,the translator employs four rules to guild his translation.When encountering long and complicated sentences,the translator deconstructs the original sentences,and analyzes the relations between each objects to grasp the author’s ideas.After translation,peer review and mentor’s instruction are followed to better the translation work.The translator commonly adopts Reinventing Sentence Structures strategy to ensure the preciseness and readability of translation work,as Winning Arguments is hard to read,it is even harder to translate.Liberal translation is utilized when some sentences are not translatable or not suitable to be directly translated into Chinese.Shift and Division are also used in the process of translation.Furthermore,the translator resorts to Wikipedia and other websites to add up background information for annotations.This report can be of referential importance to future legal document translation,while Winning Arguments can be enlightening and helpful to those who show interests in arguments in different fields.Law-related people also can resort to this translation to update their knowledge of American law.