On Legal Term Translation: From The Perspective Of Comparative Legal Culture

The study of translation of legal language is a bilingual research. It involves two substantial aspects: one is the language, the other is the culture. Almost all translation theories address translation activity to a certain extent as communication, accordingly, translation is universally acknowledged as a cross-cultural communication. Legal translation from English to Chinese and Chinese to English takes in differences and integrations among different legal cultures. Therefore, on one hand, in the process of legal translation, the special stylistic features are to be taken into account, i.e. the uniqueness in grammar, sentence structure and wording; on the other hand, the classification of laws, their sources, provisions of law and the interpretations thereof, especially the background under which such legislation is stipulated and the legal culture discrepancies between Western countries and China are to be probed into.The thesis touches upon the complementary relationship between language, culture and law, gives an overview of the concept of legal culture and the different notions held by Chinese as well as foreign scholars, and looks back on the basic concepts and principles regarding legal translation as well as the proper qualification that a legal translator shall possess. The author proposes to touch upon the subject matter from the perspective of comparing Chinese and Western legal culture, analyzes how the legal culture elements cut into and channel the translating activities of legal translator during the process, demonstrates three levels of equivalence between the source legal concepts and target legal concepts in Chinese and Western legal cultures, namely the near equivalence, partial equivalence and non-equivalence. For each level of equivalence, the author tries to elaborate in great detail with illustrative figures and lists a set of specific examples of translation of legal terms as examples. Additionally, respective possible translation strategies are developed in tackling terminological incongruency between Chinese and Western legal systems, such as literal translation, paraphrasing, neologism, using neutral expressions and so on.By exploring the comparative legal cultural elements in legal term translation, we may recognize from a more sophisticated perspective of the relations between legal language and translation of law, further our knowledge of such a discipline, achieve and reinforce the inter-disciplinary integration. The research subject of combining legal term translation and comparative legal culture is in its infancy, thus, the author looks forward sincerely to witnessing more extensive discussions in this topic.