Report On The Translation Of An English Legal Scholarly Text: "We'll See You In … Court! The Lack Of Arbitration Clauses In International Commercial Contracts"

This report is concerned with the translation of an English legal scholarly text.The source text,with studies on plenty of international contracts,refutes the widely-held assumption that arbitration clauses are more frequently adopted than litigation clauses in international agreements and lists substantial evidence to suggest otherwise.It may call the attention of export-oriented Chinese enterprises to value litigation clauses in their international commercial contracts so that they can better settle potential disputes.In this report,the background of this translation practice,the type and characteristics of the source text and the translation process are discussed.The translation cases of this legal scholarly text are approached under the guidance of the strategy of static equivalence and principles of legal translation,with the foci of analysis on the lexical,syntactic and textual levels.It is hoped that,with this translation practice,the author can introduce innovative foreign legal viewpoints to promote international legal exchanges.It is also hoped that the translation methods of typical words and sentences in legal scholarly texts as observed and summarized in this report may shed some light to the Chinese translation of research articles on international commercial contracts in particular and legal scholarly works in English in general.