Investigating The Mutual Translation Of Effective Laws In English And Chinese

The history of law and its language has proved that the constant development of every legal system with its language system cannot be done without assimilating useful elements from other legal systems through translating.It is with the constant "translation flow", however, that the historical legal geneology of China has gradually attained its great nirvana transforming from the feudally conservative and self-assertive "conventional codes handed down from ancestors" to an "all embracing modern law while boasting its reform and opening to the outside world" since the modern times. It is because of the constant infuence of this "translation flow" that even today's prosperously evergrowing socialist legal system typical of the Chinese characteristics is still being regarded as "a world full of foreign legal words"With the time passing, nevertheless, "the Chinese law as a world full of foreign legal words", being once seemingly a derogatory doctrine, is nowadays endowed with neoteric connation, signifying that it is the same "foreign legal words" being once merely used to mean introducing advanced legal ideas from foreign countries into China that has nowadays been also used to mean translating or exporting legal ideas of the Chinese law into the native countries and also make themselves become "a world of foreign legal words——the Chinese legal words ", having realized a great transmutation of the Chinese law whose development and growth was once based on "foreign legal words" into one of the most important legal resources favored by the indigenous world and eventually made China experience the great transformation from law-importing into law-exporting. Therefore, the corresponding research on the translation of the legal language should also be switched from the previously unidirectional focus on "the translation of foreign languages into Chinese" to concentrating on bidirectional comparison of "mutual translation between foreign legal languages and the legal Chinese". Thus, the desertation——Investigating the Mutual Translating of the Effective Laws in English and Chinese:A Contrastive Linguistic Approach, comes into being.The desertation,being based on the bilingual materials from the publications of mutual translation of contemporary legal languages in both English and Chinese as evidential materials for its argumentation, makes a comparative study of the three levels of word, sentence and text, and practically analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the mutual translation of the legal languages of English and Chinese, pointing out objectively the problems and putting forward the approaches to solve them,so as to reveal the potential laws behind the mutual translation of current legal languages of English and Chinese for the purpose of stimulating more enthusiasts' participation in the legal translation and jointly promote the study of both theory and practice for the translation of the legal languages fron legal English into legal Chinese or vice versus.The desertation is composed of three parts:introduction,the body and its conclusive remarks.The introduction makes a detailed elaboration of the desertation for the purpose of figuring out the legal language and its relevant concepts and carding the legal language of China and foreign countries and its source of translation studies so as to reveal the purpose and significance and the innovation of desertation and in the meantime put forward the opinions with regard to the problems under discussion.The body of the desertation is composed of five chapters. Chapter one makes macro-comparison of words, sentences and texts between English and Chinese legislative texts. Although the English and Chinese legislative texts are commonly characterized by accuracy, fuzziness and specialty, there are discrepancies in the legal culture and legal history between English and Chinese legal words;legal terms in both English and Chinese actually form an inevitable part of legal language, essentially characterized by their singulariy in sense and register, fixity in form, up-to-datedness in creation and sometimes fuzziness in explanaton. The models of the English and Chinese legislative sentences are commonly characterized by three syntactic types, i.e. permissions, prohibitions and obligations, and three syntactic forms, including presupposition-processing, imperative-command and explanation-statement. The comparison between English and Chinese legal texts includes two aspects:one is the elements including title, chapter, section, paragraph, item and sub-item;the other is the analysis of the discrepancies in language structure of English and Chinese legal texts from the perspective of modern text studies, such as grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion.Chapter two elaborates the basic norms for English and Chinese legal translation and basic requirements for legal translators. It is required that legal translation should not only comply with general norms of the translation but also establish a set of special norms in conformity with the unique characteristic of legal translation. With a view to conform to the translation of the legal language, the "translation of language for special purposes (TLSP)", we propose three requirements for the legal translation, such as specialty, authority and operability while offering three norms for legal translation, i.e., accuracy, equivalence and precision and then four requirements for the legal translator.Chapter three probes into the translation of English and Chinese legal words, legal terms included. The basic quality of the legal translator is to effectively identify and reflect the legal meaning of common words in the translation. Since the translation of legal terms constitutes the focal point of the translation of legal words, understanding cultural discrepancies behind the English and Chinese legal terms constitutes an important requirement for the successful legal translation. As such, we propose different norms for the translation of common legal words and legal terms.Chapter four discusses the similarities and discrepancies of the structure of English and Chinese legal sentences and their translation. This chapter firstly makes analysis and comparison of English and Chinese stylized legal simple sentences and complex sentences, in which, simple sentences are mainly reflected by declarative sentences and imperative sentences and complex sentences by presupposition-processing relationship or conditional-result sentences, for example, where or if can be easily judged because of definite meaning and complete form while it is difficult to judge the presupposition sentences in legal Chinese since such sentences are mainly implicit or expressed by "……的"or"……者''in Chinese, with much variation. According to the characteristics of English and Chinese legal sentences, we propose equivalent translation of simple sentences and comprehensive translation of complex sentences of the effective English and Chinese legal sentences.Chapter five makes elaborations on the comparison and transfer of effective English and Chinese legal texts, paying close attention to lexical cohesion and grammatical cohesion and their translation in complex legal texts, the former attaches great importance to the repetition of the same words and the synonyms and the hyponymy in English and Chinese legal languages and their mutual translation and the latter to explicit representation and implicit representation of personal reference in English and Chinese legal languages and their translation.The last part of the desertation is the conclusion. Despite the irreplaceable role in each historical reform period, the legal translation has not attracted the attention from the translation circle and relevant academic fields, causing rare researchers and scarce research achievements up to now. Therefore, the conclusion of this paper points out the problems still confronted by translation studies of the legal language at present, calls for the academic circle to pay more attention to the translation of the legal language and delivers further conceptions on theory construction of the legal translation and the promotion of the recognition of the value of the legal translation.