Domestication And Foreignization In C-E Translation Of Legal Terminology

With the increase of China's opening-up, it is getting more and more important for Chinese legal translation. Since Hong Kong came home, bilingual legislation has been necessary there. However, some of the translated texts are not satisfying in quality. Being important in the legal glossary, legal terminology translation is a hot topic in legal translation research. The quality and the accuracy of legal terminology translation often determine the quality of whole translation of the legal documents. Hence, in the translation of Chinese legal terminology, several basic principles should be observed in order to avoid the possible negative consequences in legal effects caused by inaccurate term translation. But up to today many researches on legal terminology translation focus on methods in translation from English into Chinese, while strategies on legal terminology translation from Chinese into English lack theoretical guidance. Because Chinese law and Anglo-American law belong to different legal systems and legal culture, meanwhile legal terminology obviously represents the legal culture so that in this thesis, the author attempts to discuss the C-E legal terminology translation method from the cultural aspect.There are two basic translation strategies:domestication and foreignization. The two strategies have their respective advantages and disadvantages. The former means bringing the foreign culture closer to the readers in the target culture, and making the target text recognizable and familiar to the readers to reach better communicative effect at the risk of culture loss. Foreignization, on the other hand, means taking the reader over to the source text and in turn to the foreign culture and making him or her see the differences. Foreignization can even enrich and develop the target language but the version produced through strategy of foreignization tends to be obscure and hard to understand.In this thesis, the author considers the purpose of legal translation, begins with the reasons that influence the choices of the translation strategies, including the translator's cognition of source and target culture, text types and translation purpose, and tries to analyze in details the two strategies in terms of legal cases, especially the calculation of the conceptual similarity, with the expectation to figure out an approach which is of instructive significance to translate Chinese legal terminology into English.