English And Chinese Legal Texts: Their Structural Features Vs Translation Strategy

With the quick step of globalization, international exchange between China and other countries becomes more and more frequent. As one of the most indispensable fields of the international exchange, law shall be needed in frequent mutual communication to institutionalize the act of both parties, and the standard of legal translation is urgently needed. However, high-quality legal translation comes from the systematic and overall understanding of legal language. Since language is the life of the law, vocabularies and sentences constitute the basic unit of a language. The unique characteristic of the legal text determines the morphological and syntactic characteristics of English and Chinese legal texts.Researches of today have concentrated on the characteristic of the legal English vocabulary, but its syntactic features are ignored, and the results in legal Chinese are hard to find. As most studies in this regard were not be able to set up a fixed standard, we can find different analyses from different angles in a certain article, while those articles that aim at a concrete instance are only made by the comparison between two English versions.Therefore, this thesis takes English and Chinese versions of Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China as concrete instances, summarizes the morphological and syntactic characteristics of English and Chinese legal texts, and makes a contrastive analysis of two versions. Furthermore, it sets a clear standard and principle of legal translation, and analyzes the translation techniques applied in the English version of Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China. Then, on the basis of the analysis, this thesis develops the strategy of Chinese-English legal translation.