Translation Strategies For Legal Terms

The translation material is selected from "Chapter 11 US Intellectual Property Law" of the Legal English Intensive Reading Course,a textbook for Legal English Certificate exam.When translating the material,the author encountered a great difficulty with the translation of legal terms.Natural equivalents are difficult to be found.To resolve this problem and create an equivalent for a word or phrase in the source text,Susan Sarcevic came up with seven translation strategies,namely lexical expansion,lexical delimitation,paraphrasing,neutral terms,borrowing words,literal equivalents and neologisms.At the same time,China belongs to the civil law system and the US belongs to the Anglo-American law system.Some seemingly equivalents have different connotations,known as the false friend trap that we should also be wary of.Based on the practice,the author adopted Susan Sarcevic's four translation strategies,respectively lexical expansion,lexical delimitation,paraphrasing and neutral terms.According to her,a translator can expand or delimit the meaning of the equivalent by adding restrictive modifying words,explain the definition of the equivalent or use a neutral term.It should be noted that Susan Sarcevic's translation strategies only serve referential use.These strategies are just the tool of translating so as to give a translation closest to the target language.