Lexical Characteristics Of Legal English And Legal Lexicon Translation

The present thesis is devoted to a study of lexical characteristics of legal English and legal lexicon translation. The thesis consists of five parts.Chapter One is an introduction to legal English, dealing with the definition, functions and stylistic features of legal English. The following chapter is a survey of legal English from the grammatical perspecttewith a view to analysing the most prominent grammatical features of legal English. In this chapter, the author conducts an overall syntactical and textual study of coordinate construction, long sentence, complicated adverbials, attributive structure and nominalization in the field of the English language of law. And in Chapter Three, attention is focused on the main body of this thesis, that is, the lexical characteristics of legal English. After an introduction of the development of the English lexicon and language of the law, the author carries out the study of the lexical characteristics in nine aspects. Three subsections are related to the origin of legal lexicon: words from Old and Middle English, words and phrases from Latin, words from Old French. Five subsections expound the specialty of the employment of words and expressions in legal English: common words with uncommon meanings, terms of art, words and expressions with flexible meanings, rare adoption of pronouns as well as coordination of synonyms or near-synonyms. Meanwhile one particularsubsection is reserved for the discussion about the usage of a modal auxiliary shall in legal English. These detailed analyses might enable us to draw a conclusion without much difficulty, a conclusion that the lexical characteristics of legal English result largely from the object of legal style: to achieve formality and precision. In Chapter Four a discussion is made on the legal lexicon translation. In the first sections of this chapter, some translation theories as well as criteria for translation are presented before the author makes an attempt to recommend specific criteria for legal translation, which are Faithfulness, Accuracy, Smoothness, Consistency.In light of these criteria, the author makes an analysis of the English version of the Contract Law of the People's Republic of China and holds that those who are handling legal document English-Chinese translation should in no case fail to use such techniques as adoption of here-/there-words to avoid ambiguity, adoption of words and expressions typical of If gal English, adoption ofexact words to achieve precision, non-adoptionof pronouns wherever possible, correct adoption of modal auxiliary shall, observation of the principle of consistency, attaching importance to thedifferences between source language and target language when tackling translation with strings of synonyms or near-synonyms, finding out corresponding vague words or expressions for the flexible ones in source language. When the above-mentioned techniques are put into practice, the four criteria for legal translation will be observed and better translationscreated.The author hopes the thesis can be a study which has both practical and theoretical values.