A Report On The Translation Of A Chinese Legal Scholarly Text:Empirical Study On The Mechanism For The Imposition Of Death Penalty In Cases Of Intentional Homicide

The accelerating development of globalization has brought about more frequent international exchanges,and an increasing number of international trade disputes have accordingly been triggered.Against this backdrop,there is a growing demand for legal translation,and legal outreach communications have also become increasingly important;nevertheless,current studies regarding legal translation mostly remain within the confines of translation of legal provisions and terminologies,whereas legal scholarly texts,as important information materials of a country’s outreach communications of its major findings in jurisprudential studies,have not been attached importance to,and thus this constitutes the most direct reason to conduct the present study.The source text selected for this translation practice is the Chinese legal scholarly text:Empirical Study on the Mechanism for the Imposition of Death Penalty in Cases of Intentional Homicide.Considering the importance of text typological analysis in translation,the translator tries to approach the translation of legal scholarly texts from the perspective of text typologies as proposed by Rei?(2004)and Newmark(2001),and probe into the characteristics,and translation principles and strategies of legal scholarly texts with a view to giving ideas for further studies in this frontier.On one hand,in terms of the typological analysis of the source text,the source text constitutes a legal scholarly text(Cao,2008),an informative text(Rei?,2004),and a purely descriptive text(?ar?evi?,1997)without any legally binding force;on the other hand,on the basis of the characteristic analysis of the source text,the source text,given its empirical study subject,constitutes a legal text in its essence,and accordingly embodies the characteristics of legal texts in a lot of ways;moreover,based on the text typological and characteristic analysis of the source text,it is concluded that the text type and the characteristics of the source text determine the translation principles and strategies of the source text respectively at the macro level and at the micro level,andtranslation of legal scholarly texts does not mean simple replacement of legal concepts and systems in the source language with those in the target language.As regards the translation principles of legal scholarly texts,translation principles of both scholarly texts and legal texts should be complied with,and with reference to the translation strategies,translation of legal scholarly texts should be target-language-oriented,and focus on the transference of information and readers’ reaction to ensure that target readers can fully understand the information conveyed and the content expressed;in addition,suggestions are made on how to conduct further study on translation of legal scholarly texts,that is,how to make use of rewriting and trans-editing methods in translating legal scholarly texts on the basis of familiarity with western scholarly and writing tradition,which serves as a reference for further study in this area.