A Report On The E-C Translation Of Child Justice Administration In Africa(Excerpt) From The Perspective Of Text Type Theory

This translation practice is taken from Chapter 4 of the scholarly legal text Child Justice Administration in Africa by the African writer Mariam Adepeju Abdulraheem Mustaphaok.The book identifies,analyses and assesses the legal and institutional regimes for child justice administration and the dispositions for handling child delinquents generally and within Nigeria and South Africa as case studies respectively of a developing and a transitioning context in Africa.Also,the book evaluates the extent to which the child justice administration in the two countries complies with the international standards.It further analyses the inherent problems and challenges associated with children in the process of criminal justice system,making this book a significant guide to child justice reform in Africa,especially Nigeria,aiming to help people in legal profession understand the current situation and development prospects of child justice in Africa.Text type theory is an important research result of the functional school of translation.One of the representative of the German functional school,Katharina Reiss,who proposes that text types can be divided into informative,expressive and operational types.Text type theory holds that the translation strategy of a text depends on the type and function of the text,that is,different translation strategies are needed for different types of texts.Scholarly legal text falls into the category of informative texts.Therefore,the message should be delivered accurately and truthfully.Text type theory provides a sound theoretical foundation for scholarly legal translation.This practical report summarizes the translation methods of scholarly legal translation from three aspects under the perspective of text type theory: at the lexical level,the translator summarizes the translation of legal terms,shall,pronouns and nominalization;at the syntactic level,the translator responds to the translation of passive voice by converting voice,dealing with the problem of unclear logic in the translation of long and complex sentences by reorganizing the sentence structure;at the discourse level,the translator analyses the logical connectives and simile in the scholarly legal translation,which has an effect on making the translation more vivid and achieving coherence of the text.The translator hopes that this report will shed some lights on translation of the similar text by summarizing experience of E-C translation of this scholarly legal text.