A Practice Report On The E-C Translation Of IP Legislative Texts Under Toury's Translational Norms Theory

In face of the rapid progress of science and technology and the deepening of economic globalization,intellectual property(IP)has become a magic weapon for nations and enterprises to be invincible in international competition.For China,intellectual property legal system is “exotic”,so in the process of building the legal protection system of intellectual property rights with Chinese characteristics,it is of great significance to draw lessons from the advanced experience of intellectual property legislation in western countries,which leads to an urgent demand for the translation of foreign IP legislative texts.This practice report takes the E-C translation of the UK Patent Act 2014 as a case study to explore the problems encountered in the translation process of IP legislative texts and tries to put forward solutions to solve these problems under the guidance of Toury's translational norms theory.IP legislative texts are both legal and technical texts,with very strong professionalism.Some typical translation problems are found in the translation practice.Firstly,problems in terminologies,namely,failure to localize legal terms,technical terms misused for common words and inconsistency in the translation of terms;secondly,problems in long and complex sentences,namely,important information missing and illogical sentence structure;and thirdly,problems in discourse level,namely,poor cohesion and coherence of discourse and inconsistent language style with the source text.Through the analysis on the features,functions and translation principles of IP legislative text and under the guidance of Toury's translational norms theory,solutions can be put forward from the following levels:(1)from the perspective of initial norms,domesticating translation and foreignizing translation are main strategies to achieve “acceptability” and “adequacy” respectively;(2)from the perspective of operational norms,borrowing and literal translation are used to solve problems in terminologies;dividing or reorganizing long and complex sentences,shifting sentence voice and part of speech and explicating hidden or implicit information are adopted to solve problems in long and complex sentences;and following the sentence structure and the language style with the source text are main techniques in solving problems in discourse level.The translation strategies and methods to solve problems in terminologies,long and complex sentences of IP legislative text as well as discourse proposed in this practice report are helpful to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the translation of such texts,thus promoting IP exchange and cooperation between China and foreign countries.