Chinese-English Translation Of Legislative Texts In View Of The Linguistic Features Of The English Legislative Language

This thesis aims to discuss the Chinese-English translation of legislativetexts in view of the linguistic features of the English legislative language. First, the thesis gives out different classification of legal texts, such as the functional classification of legal texts, the classification of legal texts in legal linguistic field and in legal field, and explains the reason why the author chooses the legislative text as the kind of legal texts to be discussed in this thesis. And then, the thesis lists out different current views on translation, like the communicative theory on translation, the functional approach to translation, the Skopostheory and the integrated approach to translation and etc, and proves their inefficiency for the translation of legislative texts owing to the specific functional and linguistic features of legislative texts. Further, the thesis does a deliberated discussion and summarizes the various lexical and syntactic features of the English legislative language. That is, in terms of lexicon, lots of archaism, words of French and Latin origins, various technical terms and official words are used in the English legislative language; while in terms of syntax, the legislative provisions have to follow fixed logic order and lots of complex prepositional phrases, nominalization, binomial and multinomial expressions cluster in the legislative sentence. And last, by giving out two detailed analysis of how linguistic features of English legislative language influence the process of legislative translation, the thesis concludes: The translator should render literal and faithful translation based on the exact linguistic features of the target legislative language and with the complete understanding of the equal legal meanings and function achieved in both the source and target texts through the exact rendering of linguistic elements in the target legislative text.