Illocutionary Equivalence

The expansion of foreign trade inevitably increases the need for the translation of legal documents. More and more articles related to this subject have been published. Most of them have made their contributions to the research on the translation of legal documents from the point of view of vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar.This thesis, however, attempts to explore the subject from a quite different angle — pragmatics, especially speech act theory, and puts forward the concept of illocutionary equivalence. Austin, the founder of speech act theory, thinks that language is used to do things, to achieve a certain goal. Law is made to regulate people's behavior in the form of language, and therefore legal language performs the acts of conferring rights, imposing obligations and stating facts. Compared with other text types, legal texts perform relatively stronger pragmatic functions. Therefore, it is much more meaningful to discuss legal translation from the perspective of pragmatics. But what we should always bear in mind is that the functions and meanings of linguistic expressions should never be treated in isolation, as they are connected, in one way or another, to each other and restricted by the context. These factors should not be ignored in the course of translation.This thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter One is a general introduction to speech act theory, with emphasis on the classification of illocutionary acts.Chapter Two explores the concepts of text, text typologies and text act.Chapter Three analyzes and classifies legal speech acts after a brief description of the characteristics of the language of the law.Chapter Four first reviews some translation theories and then introduces the concept of illocutionary equivalence.Chapter Five fully examines how to achieve illocutionary equivalence in translating Chinese legal texts at three different levels: equivalence of individual speech acts, equivalence of illocutionary structure and equivalence of text act.The conclusion drawn from this thesis is that in legal translation, the translator needs to consider not only how to convey the accurate meaning of the original text, but also how to produce on its readers an effect as close as that obtained on the readers of the original, that is, how to achieve illocutionary equivalence between SL and TL, because the main purpose of legal texts is to regulate people's behavior, and not purely to give information.