Foreignization And Translation Of English Legal Terms

This paper aims at describing and analyzing the foreignization strategy in thetranslation practice of legal terms, especially legal English terms. It begins with abrief survey of the definitions and classifications of culture, which plays a verysignificant role in the translation of legal terms. Then according to various factors,such as different legal conceptions between the common law system and theContinental law system, disparate development of civilizations in different nations(different levels of economic development, degrees of political civilization andcultural openness), different legal cultures are illustrated from three aspects: differentlegal systems, different popular cultures and different evolution histories. Since LegalChinese and English terms have their own specific origins reflecting different legalcultures, there is great "vacancy of terms" between Chinese and English legallanguages, including the "vacancy" of equivalent legal terms in Chinese language andthe in-overlapping of terms between the English language and Chinese language, suchas terms with similar meanings, terms with different meanings and terms withopposite meanings.In dealing with cultural differences, there are usually two translation strategies:domestication and foreignization. The former, whichistarget-language-culture-oriented, puts emphasis on the target language culture in orderto make the translated texts intelligible and acceptable for the TL readers; while inforeignization, the translator is source-language-culture-oriented and strives topreserve as much as possible the exotic cultural flavor of the source language. Due tothe essence of legal terms——that is, things signified by legal terms are artificial,foreignization strategy is preferred in this thesis in the translation of Legal Englishterms, since it is not only good at conveying their original meanings, but also helpfulto retain their original flavors. As for three types of Legal English terms——terms oflegal art, borrowed terms and terms of plain language, various translation methods are introduced, even though some of which used to be considered as methods appliedonly by the domestication strategy, such as free translation, footnote, pre-modifier andpost-explanation, creating new terms and etc. With the "cultural turn" growing up intranslation theories both in China and abroad in the last 20 years, foreignization isregarded as the inevitable trend of translation theory, and it will help in translatinglegal terms.