The Legal Cultural Default And Its Compensation In Translation

Since the emergence of the"cultural turns"in translation studies in the West in the 1970s, the legal translation has been regarded as one important cross-cultural communication activity and more attention has also been given to the role of the legal culture in translation. Due to the differences between different languages and legal cultures, the defaulted legal cultural elements in the source text, the common legal culture background shared with the readers of the source text, are bound to incur translation losses, such as lexical default, semantic meaning and culture image. In order to achieve the readability and communication purpose of the translation, the translator needs to take necessary measures to have translation losses compensated.Due to the discrepancies in language and culture, translation loss has accompanied translation from the beginning of translation activity. In the history of the Western and Chinese translation, many researchers have long realized that translation loss is inevitable and needs compensation and have proposed different compensation strategies pertinently. The commonness of language and culture makes translation possible while the discrepancies of language and culture make not all translation possible, that is, translation is relative. Isomorphism constitutes the strong foundation for the existence of translatability and untranslatability. It is the relativity of isomorphism that makes translation compensation necessary.Given the significance of compensation studies to translation theory and practice, this paper endeavors to introduce translation compensation studies to the legal translation, making up the losses arising form the legal cultural default. This paper mainly focuses on: the essential reasons for the legal cultural default, major translation losses from the legal cultural default, the history and mechanism of translation compensation studies, compensation norms,categories and strategies. The legal translator should bear in mind the objective existence of translation loss, implement the compensation in the whole translation process and consciously take proper compensation strategies to make necessary compensation, so as to deeply understand the essence of the legal culture and the legal language, promote the readability of the translation and achieve the purpose of cross-cultural communication and the accuracy of the legal translation.