E-C Translation Report On Legal-lay Communication:Textual Travels In The Law(Excerpt)

The E-C translation project selected excerpts from Legal-Lay Communication:Textual Travels in the Law as materials.This report mainly expounds the significant difficulties in translation of conceptual metaphors when translating academic texts,and summarizes the corresponding translation methods based on Newmark’s the Communicative Translation Theory.Once only regarded as a rhetorical device in literary texts,metaphor now is widely used in many types of text,including academic text.Scholars often use conceptual metaphors to explain their abstract research ideas and academic findings.Therefore,when translating academic texts,under the premise that there are many differences between Chinese and English,such as language system and cultural background,how to reproduce the mapping condition of conceptual metaphors and make the information and reading experience of translated text the same as the original text is the main difficulty of the translation project.This report elaborates the difficulty mainly in two aspects: 1.difficulty in translating connotation of conceptual metaphor;2.difficulty in reproducing the metaphorical structure of conceptual metaphor.Under the guidance of Newmark’s Communicative Translation Theory,this report proposes the following translation methods for the above difficulties: First,for metaphors with a high degree of similarity in mapping condition,translating conceptual metaphor with addition to avoid potential loss of its implication;second,for metaphors that have considerable similarity in mapping condition but possibly will cause certain obstacles to target readers’ understanding after translation,adjust oradapt the metaphor;third,when metaphorical structure is difficult to reproduce but some metaphorical concepts can be established in target language,reconstruct the metaphor;fourth,when metaphorical structure is difficult to reproduce,translating the metaphor with replacement or paraphrase.The adopted translation methods helps the author to effectively deal with the difficulties in the translation of conceptual metaphors in the English-Chinese translation of academic texts in this project.The author hopes that this report can provide references for other translators in academic texts translation and metaphor translation.