A Report On The Translation Of American Massachusetts Jury Duty:You Make A Difference (Episodes 10,11 And 12 Of Season 2)

The translation of legal texts is an important means of cultural communication and an effective medium for China to draw lessons from western legal,social and cultural systems.American jury system,as an important innovation improving amid doubts and reforms,has now evolved into a primary approach to American judicial democracy.That is of significant reference for the Chinese judiciary reform.To enrich studies on this topic,the author opts to translate the English transcript of the American Massachusetts’ TV show,Jury Duty:You Make a Difference into Chinese.The text aims to inform the public knowledge of jury duty,containing a variety of terminologies and meanwhile demonstrating the style of daily conversation.The author expects this translation can contribute to the exploration of popular legal text translation and widen the channels for Chinese readers to know about American democratic judicial system.The author has analyzed the factors of the source text that affect its translation.Based on the results,the author decides to abide by Tytler’s Three Principles of Translation,endeavoring to deliver a translation with the same ideas and similar characteristics of the original,and with all the ease of original composition.In general,the author mainly adopts literal translation assisted by free translation.Flexible solutions are taken to tackle various translation difficulties.In the face of unapt translation of legal terms,the same word with different meanings and grammatical ellipse,the author adopts the retranslations of her supervisor and other scholars,discerns contextual meanings of polysemy and makes up for grammatical elements,so as to convey accurate senses.In view of the precise context format and informal everyday utterance,the author manages to produce equivalent effects in the Chinese version so as to reproduce the stylistic characteristics of the original.As regards passive voice,long,complicated sentences and cohesion devices,the author employs conversion,rearrangement,substitution,ellipse and other strategies,to see to it that the translated text is natural and coherent.The author has found that in translating a text of this kind,it is not only the language to be translated,but the culture and functions of the text to be transferred.