An English-Chinese Translation Of The John Hinckley Trial:Transcript Excerpts(Part One)and A Report On Thetranslation

Trial transcripts authentically record the scene of a trial,exhibiting how legal language is used in reality.They are legal texts worth researching and translating.The author of this thesis chooses some parts of the trial transcript of the Hinckley case as the source text and tries to investigate the translation strategics for legal texts like trial transcripts under the guidance of Peter Newmark's translation theory.The specific source texts selected include The John Hinckley Trial:Transcript Excerpts(Part One)and a news report entitled "Sifting of Jury Panel Begins at Hinckley Trial in Capital".The whole process of translation covers three main stages including pre-translation,translation and proofreading.To control the quality of the translation,different procedures are taken in each stage.Peter Newmark classifies texts into three main types based on the functional theory of language:expressive texts,informative texts and vocative texts.He also proposes the concepts of semantic translation and communicative translation,with the former aiming at reproducing the precise contextual meaning of the author of the original and the latter aiming at creating the same effect of the original.The transcript of the Hinckley case records the opinions of the speakers in the trial and the language in it has distinet charactcristics of each speaker.Therefore,it is mainly an expressive text and should be translated semanticallv.Under the guidance of semantic translation,the author of the thesis tries to reproduce the language style and the thought process of the original speakers through conveying the precise contextual meaning of words and retaining the original syntactic structure including original word order parallel structure.modifications and special punctuation marks in sentences.Meanwhile,in consideration of the differences between the original language and the target language,the author also employs the strategy of communicative translation to make it easier for the target readers to understand the translation.Under the guidance of communicative translation,the author uses idiomatic Chinese expressions and adjusts the syntactic structure to improve the translation,making it easier for the target readers to understand.From this practice,the author concludes that semantic translation should be adopted as the main strategy while communicative translation should be adopted as the supplementary strategy in translating legal texts like trial transcripts.