Study On Translation Of Private International Law Literature

With the development of globalization and the increasing civil and commercial exchanges between countries, a country needs to refer to legal texts of different languages in the application of foreign laws and international conventions or international practices. Therefore, the translation of legal texts is becoming more and more important. At the same time, the comparative law is not only the source of Private International Law, but also the key methodology and resource of modern legal research. The significance of legal translation goes without words. Such an importance has been fully reflected in the return of Hong Kong and Macao to the sovereignty of PRC, the unity of the European Union and the bilingual legislation in Canada. Legal translation is not the exclusive practice confined to the Chinese Mainland. It can be said that the progress and development of any country’s legal system can’t be separated from the learning and absorption of outstanding achievements from other countries with the help of legal translation. For this reason, legal translation has always been an indispensable tool for different countries to exchange and communicate about their legal systems. To this end, this paper, by taking legal translation as the research object, from the point of view of private international law literatures in English, is intended to explore the inherent laws of legal literature translation from both the theoretical and practical aspect, especially to explore the historical and cultural origin and of some English literatures in the field of Private International Law, also to point out problems in the theory and practice of legal translation and propose solutions.This paper consists of three parts, including the introduction, the main body and the conclusion.The introduction mainly describes the background and significance to choose this topic, research status at home and abroad and research content and research methods adopted in this paper to outline the main points.The main body is composed of four chapters. The first chapter deals with the theory and practice of legal translation. It firstly discusses that legal translation is an important way to achieve the legal system change in social changes in the process of several times of social changes from modern to contemporary era through historical research methods, and provides main legal translation works at various stages of social change. In short, the legal translation contribution can be described as significant and remarkable. Then, it analyzes the relationship between the theory and practice of translation. The translation theory guides, recognizes and interprets the translation practice. However, it only provides macro guidance for practice. The translation theory guides translators how to control and adjust the translation objects by comparing the two languages to find out their characteristics and macro laws and predict the expression of two languages through their language capacity, so as to play the role of translation theory in guidance and application of practice. In the practice of translation, the translator shall not expect too much of the theory, just like music theory may not develop outstanding musicians and creators. In addition to guiding practice, translation theory will be helpful to recognize and interpret practice, namely, to recognize the society and inherent laws of translation activities. At last, this chapter also focuses on the essence and connotation of legal translation as well as the major translation theories in the West and their applications, and introduces some translation skills and basic principles of legal text translation.The second chapter mainly describes the basic theory of legal literature and translation, covering the concept and characteristic of legal literature. By taking the private international law literatures in English as the research object, it studies the type of private international law literatures in English and divides the private international law literatures in English into legislative literature, judicial literature, legal theory literature and international legal literature. At the same time, it tries to explore a method applicable to the translation of private international law literatures in English according to the general method of legal translation.The third chapter provides a lot of instances, which is also the focus of the dissertation. This chapter, based on the content of Chapter II, presents the translation of private international law literature in English combined with instances of private international law literatures in English in various fields according to the types of private international law literatures in English. It covers the translation problems of domestic legislation documents and translation of legal theory literatures for private international law, including translation differences in Statute Theory, Sitz Des Kechtsverhaltnisses, Theory of Governmental Interests Analysis, Doctrine of Vested Rights, Local Law Theory, and translation of international legal documents such as the relevant contents of international unified entity private law. The fourth chapter explores the creativity of translators in legal translation combined with the instance of private international law. It firstly analyzes the impact of differences in the culture and legal culture, legal culture and legal language, and English and Chinese legal languages on translators’creativity in translation activities. Then, it analyzes the restrictive and re-creative relationship between the translator and the original author in legal translation. At last, it discusses the creativity of qualified translators against the original language in translation activities.In the conclusive part of the dissertation, the author puts forward several considerations of current translation practice of private international law literatures. First, the author reviews the private international law literature translation in such different phases of history and today as the beginning at the late Qing Dynasty, the emerging development in the period of the Republic of China, the singularity of translation sources in new China and maturity and sense in translation of private international law literature after the opening and reform of China; second, the paper advances some suggestions and points out problems existent in the translation of private international law literatures with the hope of benefiting the future translation practice; finally, the present author envisions the trend of private international law literature translation.