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English And Chinese Legal Documents At Syntactic Level: Contrastive Analysis And Translation

Posted on:2006-12-08Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:L LiuFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360182956413Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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With the deepening of China's reform and opening to the outside world,and the progressive perfection of its socialist market economy, our country isaccelerating the process of its legal construction. So it is necessary to learn and borrow experiences from the laws and regulations of other countries. Meanwhile, in order to let the world know more about China's legal construction and its policies and regulations, further introduce foreign investment and promote the development and prosperity of China's economy, the importance of legal translation is becoming more and more prominent. This thesis will make a contrastive analysis of English and Chinese legal documents and a study of the translation thereof at the syntactic level.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter â…  briefly introduces legal language, including its stylistic and lexical features. Chapter â…¡ presents a general contrastive analysis of English and Chinese legal documents at the syntactic level, which covers the word order and such binary opposition as hypotaxis vs. parataxis and passive voice vs. active voice. Chapter â…¢ places an emphasis on the contrastive analysis of the sentence structures of English and Chinese legal documents. Chapter â…£ starts with a review of the translation theories both at home and abroad, and then introduces a controversial question which remains unsettled in the legaltranslation circle, that is, whether legal translation should be literal or free, and brings in Newmark's communicative translation and semantic translation. The author stresses the necessity of combining communicative translation with semantic translation when translatinglegal documents and tentatively puts forward five principles of legalformality, translationr^preti5ion, conciseness, smoothness and expressiveness, andconsistency. Chapter V discusses the techniques of translating legal sentences between the Chinese and English languages.At the end of the thesis, the author points out that legal translation is a serious job. As legal documents perform special social functions, it is of primary importance for the translation to accurately convey the meaning of the original. Translators should fully reproduce the style of the original legal regulations and try to make the translation precise, formal and impersonal. The translators should not only know and grasp the similarities and discrepancies of English and Chinese, but also have the professional knowledge of law.
Keywords/Search Tags:legal translation, contrastive analysis, syntactic level, translation techniques
PDF Full Text Request
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