A Study On The English Translation Of Intellectual Property Rights Judgments From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Enrichment

In recent years,cases of transnational intellectual property disputes resulting from multilateral trade exchanges have abounded.As the final judicial manifestation of the settlement of such disputes,the English translation of judgments can convey to people at home and abroad the thinking and decisions of our courts over such cases,which has certain social significance.And theories used in previous studies on judgment translation in most cases focused on the linguistic aspects and less on the legal-culture aspect,which has certain limitations.Pragmatic enrichment theory,on the other hand,can be used to observe,understand and explain both linguistic and cultural aspects of judgment translation,viewing the text as part of the legal culture,not just the language in a vacuum.According to Sperber & Wilson(1986),pragmatic enrichment is a lexical pragmatic phenomenon which refers to the process of pragmatic cognition in which the communicator fully invokes the context to determinate various vagueness in the use of language.It has two varieties including pragmatic narrowing and pragmatic broadening.This study takes the pragmatic enrichment perspective as a theoretical framework and selects three foreign-related judgments of intellectual property rights from the Intellectual Property Protection by Shanghai Courts as the object of this study.Adopting the methods of the case study and textual analysis,the study focuses on the pragmatic enrichment in both linguistic and legal culture contexts in the English translation of judgments,in order to figure out the specific translation strategies used in the English translation of the linguistic and legal culture contexts,and the reasons underlying different strategies.The study shows that in dealing with language-related content,such as temporal indications,thematic roles of legal acts,and discourse relations,the translator in this study in most cases uses pragmatic narrowing as a linguistic device to re-express the meaning in the original text of the judgment adequately,so as to concrete and clear the processing effort of the target language readers and obtain the contextual effect of maximum relevance.When translating legal culture related contents,such as general legal terms and legal terms related to intellectual property rights,translators tend to use pragmatic broadening as a legal culture device to expand the cultural meaning specific to the original text so that it is generalized or weakened in the target language text,thus enabling the target audience to obtain adequate relevance with less cognitive processing effort.In addition,the different translation strategies of the translator in this study are the result of factors such as Chinese-English language differences,differences in thinking,socio-cultural differences and differences in law systems.This study can provide ideas for the English translation of intellectual property rights judgments across law systems,help readers of the target language to understand the original text of the judgments accurately,and thus promote foreign-related legal exchanges in this field.At the same time,the research methods and analytical framework from the perspective of pragmatic enrichment proposed in this study can also provide a new perspective for analyzing examples of judgment translations and evaluating judgment translations,especially those of intellectual property rights.