A Tentative Study On Principles Of Legal Translation

As a kind of special-purpose translation, legal translation is only one of the sub-areas of translation. With China's successful accession to the WTO and the tendency of globalization, more and more translators have realized that the study of legal translation will become an important research topic and started to study it. According to Sarcevic, the status of legal translation is important because it determines which translations can be used in specific situations in legal communication.Most of previous studies are only focused on practical translating skills for individual words and sentences, and the comprehensive and systematic study is hardly found. Legal language has its own linguistic features. This dissertation analyzes the special features of legal language by focusing on a number of topics-terminology, grammatical structure, and style. As a sort of specialized texts, law has its own features, so is legal translation. Legal translation has its own lexical features such as frequent employment of archaic and loan words and phrases, common words with special meanings, preference for formal and big words; semantic features such as frequent use of synonyms and near-synonyms, repetition of words for accuracy; and grammatical features such as objective composition of declarative sentences and frequent employment of long complicated sentences.The legitimacy of legal texts makes it imperative that in the process of translation,"faithfulness and rigor, conventionality and smoothness"can be adopted as principles of legal translation. Then it shows, with illustrative examples, how principles of legal translation can be put into practice in actual C-E translation and vice versa. And through a comprehensive and systematic analysis of examples of misinterpretation and of translation errors evident in legal translation, the author highlights the problems and pitfalls encountered by professional translators in the field of legal translation and lays down some general strategies for dealing with these problems. Due to its features, legal translation not only demands translators'translation skills but also their profound knowledge of the law. This dissertation is only a stimulant to future research and much more remains to be done in this field.