Analysis Of Translation Criteria Of Chinese Legal Texts

After the civil law compilations work were initiated four times,the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China that truly belongs to the Chinese people finally came into effect on January 1,2021,marking a major milestone in the process of our country’s legalization process.At the same time,with the acceleration of economic globalization and the deepening of China’s reform and opening up,the scope of exchanges between countries around the world has become closer and wider,involving politics,economy,culture,law and other areas.Among them,the legal exchange between China and the West is particularly important with the development of economic activities.As the world’s second largest economy,China not only needs to understand the laws of the West,but Western countries that cooperate with China need to understand China’s laws and regulations in order to strengthen business cooperation with China and seek win-win results.There is no doubt that the English translation of Contract Book of the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China has far-reaching significance for promoting economic development and strengthening legal exchanges between China and foreign countries.At present,there are several English translations of the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China,namely,the version of National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China and Westlaw China,etc.,of which the official English translation is the version published by National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China.The author selects the official version and Westlaw China version for comparative analysis by resorting to Newmark’s semantic and communicative translation theory and Sarcevic’s views on legal translation so as to evaluate and analyze the English versions so as to point out the lexical,sentence,grammatical and stylistic errors in the two versions and correct them.This paper is divided into five chapters: the first chapter introduces the research background,research methods,research significance and thesis structure;the second chapter is a literature review,which sorts out and explains the relevant researches on legal translation at home and abroad;the third chapter is a theoretical framework,and it mainly introduces Newmark’s semantic translation and communicative translation theory,and combines Sarcevic’s view of legal translation to explain the requirements for communicative translation theory to apply to legal translation;Chapter Four is a comparative analysis of the two versions.Starting from the four standards of legal translation,this chapter makes a comparative analysis of the two English translations from the perspectives of vocabulary,sentence pattern and style.In general,the translations of the two English versions can achieve basic meaning equivalence,but the official version is more reasonable in details.The fifth chapter is the conclusion,including the limitations of this paper and related research findings.