Linguistic Features Of English Legal Texts And Their E-C Translation Techniques

It goes without saying that law is becoming more and more important in modern society. As communication among countries in politics, economics and culture increases gradually, the importance is more obvious. Since China's accession to WTO, translation of laws and regulations between Chinese and English has been more necessary. However, legal translation in China is not so satisfying compared with literary and scientific translation.After an introduction to translation theories and related knowledge of legal systems, this thesis analyzes semantic, lexical and syntactic features of legal texts. Semantic features consist of univocity, synonymity and antonymity. Lexical features are as follows: frequent use of archaic words, borrowed Latin words and French words, terms of legal art, and fuzzy words. Syntactic features include nominalization of verbs, parallel synonymous phrases, nouns modified by structures of multiple post-modification, and conditional restriction by adverbs. As for translation techniques, there are addition and omission of words, repetition, conversion, translation of negative sentences and translation of active sentences into passive ones.Although translators have difficulities in legal translation due to complicated syntactic structure and differences of legal systems, we can achieve the criteria of precision, clarity, professionalization with the guide of translation theory and translation techniques and after continuous practice in legal translation.