On The English Translation Of The "çš„" Phrase In Chinese Legislative Texts From The Perspective Of The Functional Translation Theory

Compared with the achievements in theories and practice of literary translation, study on the legal translation in China is still at the early stage and its research scope and fulfillment can not keep the pace with China's economic development and globalization. With China's further mixture with the outside world, it is both urgent and necessary to accurately translate Chinese laws and regulations and introduce them to the foreign companies in China as well as to the world. It is even more urgent and necessary to study how Chinese legislative texts should be accurately translated into English. For this reason, this thesis focuses its attention on the "的" phrase most frequently occurring in Chinese legislative texts, aiming at development and flourishing of theories of the Chinese legal translation.The "的" phrase, as a unique grammatical structure in Chinese legislative texts, bears clear national characteristics. It evolves from the "者" structure of the classic Chinese legislative texts. With its head noun often omitted, it owns all the characteristics of nouns and can perform many grammatical functions such as subject, object and adverbial, which can make Chinese legislative texts concise, accurate and legislative in feature. So far as its pragmatic functions are concerned, the "的" phrase can be used to set forth presumptions, store large information, classify people or objects of the same kind, indicate indefinite people or objects and convey derogatory meaning. These characteristics of the "的" phrase should be highlighted and focused on and be accurately transferred into the target texts.To help make the argument sound, this thesis applies the functional translation theory to the study of the English translation of the "的" phrase. It stresses the point of view that the end justifies the means and that various strategies and methods adopted in its translation are all decided by Skopos. Meanwhile, diversity of text type leads to different kinds of Skopos. The genre of the Chinese source text must be completely represented in the English translation, during the process of which due attention must be given to intratextual and intertextual coherence. Moreover, all this aims at achieving functional equivalence and at accomplishing Skopos of translation.This thesis expounds and proves that the functional translation theory can guide the rendering of legislative texts and be applied to the evaluation of the English translation of the "的" phrase. Its study demonstrates that anything happening in the translation of the "的" phrase can be explained by the functional translation theory. For example, translating the "的" phrase as adverbial clauses or prepositional phrases is to set forth and emphasize the viewpoint of presumption; translating the "的" phrase as noun clauses is to classify people or objects of the same kind, store large information, indicate indefinite people or objects and convey derogatory meaning; translating the "的" phrase as non-finite verbs is to make the source and target texts homologous in genre; and translating the "的" phrase as the subject-complementing structure is the result of making some adjustments for the reason of differences between English and Chinese and for the other reason of the "的" phrase omitting its head noun and acting as sentence elements. All this can prove that the functional translation theory is applicable to the guidance and evaluation of the English translation of the "的" phrase in Chinese legislative texts.After applying the functional translation theory to analyzing the English translation of the "的" phrase separately, this thesis also uses it to evaluate the translation as a whole and points out that there are some problems in the translation of the "的" phrase in practice. First, the English versions of the "的" phrase are only partially correspondent in functions to that of the source texts. In other words, only some of the characteristics of the source text are translated into the target texts. It means that each English translation has only accomplished parts of the Skopos. However, parts do not equal the whole andthe sum of the parts is not yet equal to the whole. So the English translation of the "的" phrase violates the rule of term consistency in the translation of scientific and technological writing. Second, judged as a whole, the language employed in the English translation of the "的" phrase is plain, as does not conform to the characteristics of obscurity of English legal language. This results from uncertainty of the target readers in translation, from the culture-specificity of the "的" phrase and eventually from different kinds of Skopos.This thesis is a case study. Prescriptive and descriptive research methods are both used in it, with the former as the main one.There must be many problems about this thesis, which are expected to be solved in the future study.