A Study On Translation Strategies Of Legal Texts From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

A legal text is a text consisting of legal language with distinguishing features.It has rigorous,formal and standardized text styles.With deepening exchanges and cooperation between China and foreign countries in various aspects,the importance of English translation of Chinese legal texts is becoming more and more prominent.The English translation quality of Chinese legal texts is directly related to whether laws and regulations of our country can be accurately understood and observed by foreigners.However,literature research has found that the current study on English translation of domestic laws and regulations still needs to be further strengthened.In 1969,Nida proposed “Functional Equivalence” based on “Formal Equivalence”and “Dynamic Equivalence”.The core of this theory is to achieve equivalence in readers’ responses through equivalence in content information.The principle of“Functional Equivalence” emphasizes the need to reproduce the source language information in the translated language with the closest and most natural equivalence,firstly in terms of meaning,and secondly in terms of style.And it holds that translators should focus on conveying the meaning of the original language without adhering to the linguistic form and structure of the original language,and that translators can appropriately reorganize the original language or change the linguistic structure in order to achieve functional equivalence.In view of this,this study takes Functional Equivalence Theory as the theoretical framework and conducts a more in-depth exploration on the translation strategy of legal texts based on the translation practice of Laws and Regulations of Property Management,aiming to confirm the feasibility of this theory in guiding the translation of legal texts and provide some inspiration for the research of this field.This thesis is divided into six chapters.The first chapter is a comprehensive introduction to the research background,research purpose and significance,research object and methodology,and layout of the thesis.Chapter two is the literature review of the previous overseas and domestic studies on Functional Equivalence Theory and legal text translation.Chapter three is the theoretical framework of the thesis.This part provides a comprehensive explanation of the origin,connotation,four concepts of Functional Equivalence Theory and the applicability of Functional Equivalence Theory in legal text translation.Chapter four provides a comprehensive analysis of the linguistic features of Laws and Regulations of Property Management from the lexical,syntactic,textual and stylistic levels.As the core chapter,Chapter five conducts an in-depth study on the translation strategies of legal texts from the four aspects: lexical equivalence,syntactic equivalence,textual equivalence and stylistic equivalence.In this chapter,the following conclusions are drawn: for the lexical features of terminologies and verbs with legal effect,translation strategies of creation and conversion are adopted to achieve functional equivalence at lexical level;for the syntactic features of more sentences without subjects and complex sentences,translation strategies of change of voices,recasting and splitting-off are adopted to achieve functional equivalence at syntactic level;for the textual features of situational discourse and high coherent discourse,translation strategies of liberal translation and addition are adopted to achieve functional equivalence at textual level;for the stylistic features of correspondence aggregates and repeated aggregates,translation strategies of loan translation and literal translation are adopted to achieve functional equivalence at stylistic level.Chapter six is the conclusion of the thesis,which includes the major findings,limitations and implications of this study.