A Report On Term Translation In How Mediation Works:Resolving Conflict Through Talk

In recent years,mediation as an important form of ADR is increasingly playing a role in resolving conflicts and eliminating disputes,and how to improve the efficiency of mediation and ensure the legitimate rights and interests of the parties has become an important issue concerned by mediation practitioners.The translation material selected is Chapters 6 to 9 of How Mediation Works: Resolving Conflict Through Talk written by Angela Cora Garcia in 2019.Garcia’s book,as the first one to use conversation analysis to examine how mediation works,is full of authentic corpus related to typical divorce mediation and small claims mediation,which is very worthy of reference and learning.While terms are the basic carrier of knowledge,the quality of term translation is often directly related to the quality of translation.Therefore,the report mainly focuses on the translation strategies of terms in legal academic monographs.According to Newmark’s text typology,Garcia’s book is an informative text with expressive and vocative functions.Therefore,the translation is based on the theory of semantic translation combined with communicative translation.As the book is interdisciplinary concerning both conversation analysis in linguistics and mediation procedure in law,terms with or without equivalents are further classified by disciplinary categories.While the translator understands terms,defines terms,and translates terms from the cognitive and linguistic dimensions,the communicative dimension is also considered to further verify its feasibility and effectiveness in the target culture.And the specific translation skills include narrowing the scope of a word’s meaning and limiting the expression range according to its connotation in the specific context;expanding the meaning of equivalent expression to avoid the contradiction of words’ meanings;and grasping the core features to create new words and adding an interpretation to translate the term.The translation of Garcia’s book is hoped to let more Chinese scholars give their attention and awareness to mediation-related research,gain the nourishment it contains,and distill its essential value.It is hoped that the translation report can give translators some enlightenment,and cause researchers in the field of term translation to attach greater importance to the specification and standardization of term translation,so as to facilitate the understanding and application by future generations.