On Legislative Discourse And Its Translation

Since the date of May 1, 2004 on which the fifth historic expansion of EU in Dublin, Ireland completed, the burden of legal translation has doubled. In European countries the legal translation market is changing rapidly as a result of the related processes of European Union integration and expansion, globalization, and the technological revolution. With regard to globalization and the technological revolution, these rapidly changing factors must be taken into account in the future legal translation.A study of legislative discourse and its translation stands at the crossroads of three domains-legal theory, linguistic theory and translation theory. By virtue of discourse structure of this paper, the main body can be divided into six chapters. Chapter One introduces a brief survey of legal translation and approaches from strict literal translation to idiomatic translation. Chapter Two firstly deals with categorization of law and then discusses linguistic characteristics of legislative expression in two levels-macro-pragmatic principle and micro-pragmatic principle. Chapter Three presents the basic information on classification of legal texts and functional orientation of legal translation. In addition, speech act theory and nature of legal texts that are necessary for choosing the proper approaches to legal translation are followed. Chapter Four systematically discusses sharp distinctions between general translation theory and legal translation, a famousmodern translation strategy and other major aspects of legal translation such as the goal of legal translation, special-purpose translation and plurilingual legal texts. Chapter Five presents various pitfalls of legal translation such as incongruency in plurilingual nations, limitation of translatability, domestication and foreignization, paradox of precision and indeterminacy and the changing role of the legal translator. From the perspectives of jurisprudence and philosophy, the author sets forth rational analyses, deeper understanding and even future directions. Chapter Six is a natural conclusion.