The Changes Of Information Elements In Chinese-English Translation Of Laws And Regulations

This paper studies the changes of information elements in Chinese-English translation of laws and regulations within the information structure of legal discourses. According to such structure, each legal discourse has a core proposition consisting of a series of subordinate information knots, which symbolize the relationship between information units made up of propositions. Each information unit contains a number of information elements. This paper attempts to apply case grammar as the analytical tool into the study of changes of information elements.The information elements, in form and content, correspond to the two concepts in case grammar, i.e. case form and case relation. In this way, changes of information elements will be realized through change of case form mainly in part of speech and voice in a proposition, and change of case relation in terms of addition and replacement of semantic cases within a proposition and sentence restructuring within two or more propositions.The influential factors can be categorized into objective and subjective. Objective influential factors, in the present study, refer to differences between two languages and between legal Chinese and legal English; while subjective factors are further classified into translator's preference and misunderstanding of the source text.Furthermore, such changes have affected information construction by means of affecting the distribution of information in a proposition or through addition or loss of information elements or information knots.The data collected are drawn from the Chinese laws and regulations in the legal corpus, for part of which quantitative analysis has been adopted. The analysis of all the extracts from laws and regulations reveals that changes of information elements are unavoidable but patterns can be summarized, which would be beneficial to the translation of Chinese laws and regulations in the future.