On The Translation Of Legal Terminologies From The Perspectives Of Sociosemiotics

As the basic and essential components of legal texts, legal terminologies not only express the stylistic features of legal texts but also reflect the typical characteristics of the legal system in a certain legal culture. The core of the legal translation is the translation of legal terminologies. Whether legal terminologies are translated accurately or not determines the translation quality of legal texts to some extent. Therefore, the translation of legal terminologies shows great significance in the process of legal translation.Compared with other translations, legal translation is not just a kind of interlingual communication, and it is also a cross-cultural and cross-legal activity. During the translation of legal terminologies, translators first need to have a good command of the source language and the target language; moreover, they are required to have a better understanding of the factors outside the language such as different legal cultures, legal systems and social settings etc.The present study attempts to analyze the translation of legal terminologies from the perspective of the sociosemiotic theory, which provides a fresh view for the legal translators. The study gives an explanation of the semiotic theory and the sociosemiotic theory derived from the former, which are the theoretical support of this study. According to the semiotic theory, the world consists of all kinds of signs, and everything in the world can be regarded as a member of various systems of signs. Swiss linguist de Saussure insists that language be a system of signs used to express concepts. The important objects of linguistic study are the relations among the signs. American logician Peirce has comprehensively illustrated the science of semiotics. He holds that a sign or representamen is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. Another American logician and semanticist Morris develops the semiotic theory of Peirce. He maintains that every sign can be divided into three parts: a sign vehicle, a represent of the sign and an interpretant. On the basis of the trichotomy of signs, he puts forward that every sign has three kinds of meaning, that is, designative meaning, linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning. Morris's three-dimensional relation of meaning lays a solid foundation for the sociosemiotic approach to translation. The sociosemiotic theory comes into being based on the study of semiotics. Eminent linguist Halliday believes that language as a system of signs produces and develops in the society, and language in nature is the product of society. Furthermore, he emphasizes that the sociosemiotic feature of language means only linguistic signs considered in the specific cultural and social contexts can they possess meanings.The first one who advocates the sociosemiotic translation approach is an American translation theoretician Eugene A. Nida. He points out that the sociosemiotic translation approach is the most comprehensive translation method. Compared with other translation methods, the great advantage of this new approach is that it studies all signs and codes employed by the human society, especially the most complicated system of linguistic signs. In our country, Professor Chen Hongwei is the representative figure of advocating the sociosemiotic translation approach. She puts forward the translation criteria of the sociosemiotic approach, and they are "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function". And she also stresses that meaning and function are inseparable two sides, which are the two indispensable factors in the evaluation of the translation quality.After analyzing the sociosemiotic feature of legal terminologies, the present study explicitly illustrates the transference of three meanings and the expression of two main functions of legal terminologies under the guidance of the sociosemiotic translation approach in order to achieve the goal of "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function" in the translation of legal terminologies.