A Contrastive Analysis Of Two English Versions Of Food Safety Law Of The PRC: Perspectives From Descriptive Translation Studies

From the perspective of Descriptive Translation Study(DTS), this thesis tries to conduct a contrastive study of the two English versions of Food Safety Law of the People’s Republic of China(2009), attempting to make an analysis of causes for differences.Firstly, the author surveys the history of DTS and gives a brief overview of DTS in China and western countries. On that basis, the author finds that although DTS has mainly been applied into literature translation and some other areas of translation studies, it is rarely seen in legal translation. Secondly, the author presents a detailed introduction to DTS and its basic points and concludes that DTS can effectively direct legal translation activities. Thirdly, a contrastive study is conducted from three levels. It reveals that American translator’s version is more concise in word selecting. Compared with Chinese translator’s use of active voice, American translator is more intended to use passive voice syntactically. In the textual level, American’s version has higher frequency of employing cohesive devices than Chinese translator’s version. The comparison between the two English versions aims not to judge the quality of a version, but to analyze the differences between the two versions so as to find out the causes and how these causes can affect translation and even the version’s acceptability. The paper reveals that legal translation can be affected by social and cultural factors. Besides, translators’ different thinking patterns and their translation purposes are also crucial. In a whole, American translator’s version is closer to legal English texts in terms of words, sentence structures and texts.This paper firstly attempts to apply DTS into legal translation studies. In contrast to traditional translation studies’ usual practice of analyzing different versions linguistically, DTS gives more emphasis on the analysis of social background, cultural and translator factors. All these provide a new angle for the investigation of legal translation.