On The Application Of The Compensatory Translation Techniques To The Legal Terms Translation In The English Version Of The Criminal Law Of People’s Republic Of China

The Criminal Law of People’s Republic of China(hereinafter referred to as "the Criminal Law")is the law formulated by the National People’s Congress with an aim to punish crimes and protect citizens in China.It stipulates the crimes and criminal liability applicable in People’s Republic of China.With the expansion of cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries,the translation of “the Criminal Law" has an enormous significance in dealing with foreigner crimes,tackling foreign related issues.As an irreplaceable part of the Criminal Law,legal terms facilitate the comprehension of the Law and the elimination of the confusion.According to the translation theory of Peter Newmark,the choice of either the semantic or the communicative translation is determined by the text type and functions of the original text in order to achieve the functional equivalence with the original text.From the social perspective,the Criminal Law is a kind of informative text,for its aims is to describe and explain Chinese legal regulations to the English readers.As a result,translators need to adopt communicative translation technique with the focus essentially on the comprehension of English readers and transfer the legal information in maximum.To this end,translators are supposed to employ some compensatory techniques especially to deal with those that may easily cause misunderstandings.All theses is to facilitate the English readers to understand the corresponding Chinese legal information.Given its authority,in this paper,the chosen English version of the Criminal Law is translated and confirmed by the Law Committee of Chinese National People’s Congress.This paper focuses on the translation of the legal terms in its English version.It tries to explore answers to such questions as how many types of compensatory techniques are adopted,how often each specific compensatory techniques is applied respectively,among them,which one is most frequently used,what are the reasons for these answers,what inspiration they give to our future translating practice.According to the research,the paper summarizes that four types of compensatory translating techniques are used in this English version,which is specification,generalization,amplification as well as paraphrase,with the technique of paraphrasing the highest frequency.After a deep analysis,this paper comes to the conclusion that all these is due to the differences of legal culture between China and western countries,the advantages of the technique of paraphrasing weighs a lot as well.China has its special national conditions and cultural history.Its cultural uniqueness and specificity determines the high frequency of paraphrasing,which is a better choice to achieve the informative equivalence between English version and Chinese version of the Criminal Law in the translating process.From the analysis above,the paper suggests that the compensatory translating techniques are practical to the translation of the legal documents(including the legal terms).These techniques are playing an important role in the effective enforcement and wide spread of such Chinese law and thus worthy of further research and application to the translation of the similar documents.