On Precision Of Legal English And Its Translation

In recent years, especially with China's membership into WTO,China will involve itself in the world's economy more profoundly andwidely. In the contemporary highly legalized society, laws are closelyconcerned with people's economic activities. China is in urgent need oflearning from foreign advanced and mature legal systems to meet newchallenges of economic development. As a result, the study of legaldocuments and legal translation has become increasingly important forlegal workers.Law is the rules and principles for human behavior, his rights andobligations and the conduct of government in an organized community,state, or nation, created or recognized by customs or by governmentinstitutions and implemented or enforced by the government. Legallanguage (or the language of law), as the carrier and manifestation of law,is broad and complex. Legal English is one of legal languages and itbelongs to the scope of applied linguistics. Legal English refers to anEnglish literary style that penetrates all the process of legislation,judicature and legal enforcement in common-law countries. As a branchof customary language, it has unique language features. One of the mostimportant characteristics of legal English is precision in its usage.So far, almost all the scholars devoted to the study of the language of the law have reached consensus that precision is not only the soul and lifeof legal English, but also the basic style of legal language. However, athome and abroad, there are not many books or articles which areconcemed with precision of legal English, and their analysis is neitherconcrete nor complete. Furthermore, there are few books aboutapplication of precision to legal translation.By applying comparative analysis approach, the thesis analyzesprecision of legal English and its translation, a character opposite but notconflicting with vagueness of language. The author is in an attempt to domore systematic analysis of precision of legal English from three aspects,that is, precision in legal English lexicon, precision in legal Englishsyntax and how to achieve precision in legal C-E translation.The thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter one provides ageneral review in which the author introduces the necessity andimportance of precision of legal English study, that is, why should wepursue precision in legal English, and its status as a subject and thesituation of its research. Chapter two presents the related theoreticalbackground which demonstrates that it is necessary to adopt the theory"faithfulness", that is, fidelity to the original texts put forward by Yan Fu,and the "functional equivalence" principle by Nida for the sake ofattaining precision of legal English in legal C-E translation. Chapter threeembodies precision of legal English from two aspects, that is, precision in legal English lexicon and precision in legal English syntax. In lexicon,legal English frequently employs archaic words, borrowed words,synonyms or near-synonyms and rare use of pronouns, adjectives andadverbs. In syntax, it often adopts nominalization structures, declarativesentences, complete sentences and parallel structures in legal English. Inchapter four, the study goes on to demonstrate in detail how to achieveprecision in legal C-E translation practice, which is the focal point of thestudy.Based on meticulous reading of works and related papers onprecision of legal English, and translation theories, the author makes asystematic summary and study of precision of legal English and itstranslation. As for the methodology of study on this subject, the thesisadopts some basic scientific methods in disciplinary research, that is,analogy, induction and deduction.