Applicability Of Functionalist Translation Theory To Legal Translation

Ever since the human society emerged, language and law can be regarded as two of the greatest invention. Language is the most important thinking carrier for human communication. However, law is regarded as the supreme rule to keep the society functioning, subrogating and developing. Law and language is closely connected.Chinese law has a long and brilliant history. It is said that early in the 2000BC of the Xia Dynasty, China had formed a complete criminal law system. However, in the west, it was not until 5BC that Greece had formed the law system. As for the origin of law, China is much earlier than the west. It is a pity that the study of legal translation started fairly late. Old China closed itself off to international interaction, which seriously impeded legal translation and the study of it. Since the founding of New China, legal translation and the study of it has gradually been valued. With its accession to the World Trade Organization and the speedup of globalization, we should pay more attention to the important role that legal translation has played in society. Especially the 2008 Olympic Games, the financial crisis and 2010 World Expo make the world as a whole and make people feel the close contact with the world. There is no doubt that legal translation played an essential role in the development of human civilization. As Susan Sarcevic has said that we are in the multilingual time and translation acts as a communicative medium for relations and laws. The translation texts have legal effects, even bringing peace or cause war. Nowadays the need for free flow of staff, goods and materials, and capital increases, so legal translation has a strong influence on our life in various ways. For example, international trade can not be achieved without legal translation.We should not only realize the importance of legal translation, but also the necessity of accuracy and communicative function for legal translation. So how to achieve accurate communicative function and which translation theory can be used to guide translation practice become the focus that all the legal translators and legal scholars pay attention to. At present, most of the scholars tend to study legal translation from the part to the whole at the linguistic micro-level as the words and sentences and the study is devoid of theory to give directions. According to the following problems, the author thinks the legal translator should have a macro concept on legal translation. The translator should try to grasp the source text according to "the purpose of translation-the intention of the source text-the typology and the function of the text-the register and the pragmatic characteristics of the text-the linguistic level of the text". This thesis employs the study method of up to the bottom that the functionists have emphasized at the macro-level. This thesis tries to combine the translation skopos and text function at the macro-level with the syntactic structures and lexical principle at the micro-level to probe in the applicability of the functionist translation theory to legal translation practice.