Functional Equivalence And Legal Translation

Along with the opening and reform going deepening, exchanges between China and foreign countries have been considerably expanded; especially after China's access to the World Trade Organization, the number of international trade issues is also increasing. In the settlement of many trade issues, most of the litigation has to be made in the oversea courts with their laws. At the same time, our nation has made the guideline of "legally manage our state affairs", and legal construction has also been improved at an amazing speed. Overseas countries, especially western developed countries have already made great number of mutual laws in which we can take many useful excellent fruits for reference. Because of the above two aspects, our needs for legal translation and legal translation research have been increasing.At present, legal linguistic research in our country has already begun, and legal text translation has also been paid great attention by practitioners in the field of legislation and translation. Recently the discussions about the translations of legal documentations associated with WTO and other foreign commence laws are the focus of the legal text translation.However, since researches on these aspects in our country began late, the work on legal translation and legal translation research lag behind the western developed countries as a whole, especially in researches of the legal translation theory and practicing methods.Translation is an inter-culture communication which has strict practicing rules and principles. This work must be done based on consummate theories. During many theories developed by worldwide scholars in this filed, Eugene A. Nida's "Functional Equivalence" theory is one of the most accepted and useful theories. Nida pointed out that the translation work is to reproduce the most suitable and fluent information equivalent to the formal information in the target language. Nida has also developed some practical rules for his "Function Equivalence" theory.The translation of law must follow the rules of both lingual function equivalence and legal function equivalence. On the basis of analyzing the characteristics of legal...