A Study Of Chinese And Western Legal Cultural Conflicts And Legal Translation Compensation

Since1980s, the research on legal translation has been shifting from the linguistic elementsto the legal culture beyond the legal contexts. First, due to the cultural differences betweenChina and Western countries, the meaning loss must be caused for both the source readers andthe target ones who share different knowledge of legal cultures. In addition, the word-to-wordlegal translation will lead to the loss of legal culture in the source texts, as the Chinese andWestern cultural conflicts, such as legal system, legal tradition and psychology may be coveredbut beyond the legal texts. In that case, translators must apply proper translation strategies tocompensate the culture loss in legal translation so as to transform the legal culture carried in thesource language into the target language completely.This thesis aims at researching the cultural conflicts between Chinese and Western legaltexts with the framework of compensation translation. It classifies the main cultural conflictsbetween Chinese and Western laws lying in social systems, legal systems, legal functions, legalprocedures, legal traditions, psychologies and the thinking methods. Meanwhile, it demonstratesthe cultural translation loss caused by these cultural conflicts mentioned above. This thesisproposes to use the compensation translation strategies to solve translation loss in legaltranslation, and it also analyzes different compensation strategies(compensation by integration,compensation by isolation, compensation with the same device, compensation with a differentdevice, compensation in a parallel location, compensation in a displaced location, synchronouscompensation and compensation in difference) at different levels. It aims to discuss how tomake the legal version achieve the completion of both the linguistic features and the culturalcharacteristics so as to avoid the translation loss. The creative points of this thesis are that firstlythe culture conflicts between Chinese and Western are regarded as the study subject, andsecondly the theory of translation compensation is used for the research on legal translation, andthirdly the application of eight compensation translation strategies is put forward to solve thetranslation loss caused by cultural conflicts.