A Study Of Legal Text Translation Based On The Relevance-Adaptation Theory

With the accelerated pace of globalization,we can find that more and more Chinese people choose to study or work abroad,which makes their life closely linked with the foreign country’s civil law.It is imperative for them to understand the laws correctly through the translated versions.Rules of Civil Procedures of the United States Federal Court(RCP)becomes obviously important to regulate the civil procedure of both American citizens and people from other countries.It is usually believed that achieving an equivalent translation is the target of legal translation.However,as the legal translation is between both legal systems and language systems involving factors such as language,law,society and history,it is impossible to achieve absolute equivalence.Legal translation shall be seen as a pragmatic process and target readers’ comprehension is the key element,so pragmatic information of legal translation shall be studied carefully.Li Zhanxi established a new framework of translation on the basis of Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory.According to his Relevance and Adaptation Theoretical Approach,translation is a process of relevance-seeking and adapting.Translators choose different translation strategies based on the cognitive environment of target readers and communicative environment to make the understanding of foreign readers achieve the intended purpose of the original author.Based on Relevance-Adaptation Theory,this thesis aims to study how the translator adapts to the specific contexts including linguistic and non-linguistic contexts,with the aid of inference to obtain pragmatic information and the strategies the translator uses to achieve optimal relevance in his translation through using qualitative and descriptive translation investigation.It is found out that the translators firstly should comprehend the source text based on the cognitive context and make a reference of the intentions of source-text writers and then the translators should adapt to target language and make linguistic choices to find the optimal relevance between the source-text writer’s intention and target-text readers’ expectation in different cognitive contexts.After reviewing the RCP and its translation done by Professor Bai Lvxuan and Bian Jianlin,we can find that there are differences between English and Chinese at lexical,syntactic and textual levels,which call for the translators to achieve contextual adaptation.Aiming for analyzing the strategies of contextual adaptation in legal translation,the thesis will investigate the adaptation in linguistic context,situational context,and cultural context as well as the translation methods or strategies along with contextual adaptation in achieving the optimal relevance,based on Relevance Adaptation Theory.