English Translation Of Chinese Legislative Texts From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the development of economic globalization, especially after China's being member of WTO, China's communication with other countries tend to be increasingly frequent, which, in turn, calls for a high demand for legal translation. But studies on legal translation seem far from satisfactory in China at present. Under such circumstances, this research aims to account for legal translation under the framework of relevance theory, attempting to provide a new perspective for legal translation studies.Relevance theory assumes translation as a double ostensive-inferential communication, involving three participants:the original text producer, translator, and the target language reader. Constrained by the principle of relevance, the translator combines the new ostensive stimulus in the original text with his cognitive environment to infer the original communicative intention. Given the linguistic features of target language and context of target language readers, the translator then chooses proper methods to make the translation consistent with the principle of relevance in target language.With the aim to explore how relevance theory is applied to legislative texts translation or how the legislative texts translation could be accounted for in the relevance-theoretic framework, this thesis concentrates on two aspects:lexicon and syntax. Through a brief analysis of the linguistic features of English legislative language and comparison between English and Chinese legislative texts, Chapter three demonstrates the similarities and differences between these two languages. Chapter four illustrates how to account for legal translation through the employment of relevance theory. In lexical translation, the translator should have an accurate understanding of the original legal concepts and renders them into English in consistence with the habitual way of expression, taking the expectation of target readers into consideration. In the translation of syntax, the translator should, on the one hand, comprehend the Chinese legal sentences and identify the implied meaning. On the other hand, with plenty knowledge of the syntactic structures of English legislative language, the translator renders Chinese legal sentences into English ones that are consistent with the cognitive environment and abilities of English readers. Thus, target language readers could perceive contextual effects without unnecessary efforts.