| In the history of human civilization, legal translation, as a sort of special-purpose text translation, can date back to the very ancient times, and it plays an essential role in the development of human civilization. In modern times, with the rapid development of science and technology, the tendency of globalization promotes the development of intercultural communication between different nations, from which it is unavoidable that some disputes and problems may arise. Law, as an efficient tool to solve such troubles, has an increasing effect and influence on people's life, so legal translation becomes an emergent task for the international society.However, compared with the large amount of daily output of translation of legal documents in international society, theoretic study on legal translation is rather underdeveloped. Lawyers and linguists tend to do some micro research such as on the levels of terminology and syntax, and they believe that general translation theory can also be applied to legal translation. And many lawyers and linguists have also tried this attempt. Actually, as a sort of special-purpose text translation, legal translation has its own characteristics. According to Susan Sarcevic, legal translation should be considered not only as a process of linguistic transcoding but also as an act of communication in the mechanism of the law. Therefore, other factors concerning legal texts should also be considered in legal translation. According to Reiss's text typology, different texts need different translation techniques in accordance with the features of the texts. Texts can be classified as three types according to their functions: content-focused texts, form-focused texts and appeal-focused texts. Legal texts are to prescribe people's conducts, to ask people to do something, and to prohibit people doing something. Therefore, legal texts belong to appeal-focused texts. As appeal-focused text, legal texts have their own features: text features and linguistic features. Though the legal systems in different countries are not the same, legal texts may have similar format. Legal translators must follow the fixed format when translating; otherwise, they cannot reach the same legal effects.As an independent text type, legal texts also have apparent linguistic features, which are reflected on three levels: lexical features, semantic features and grammatical features. Legal words may choose formal and general words to reach the serious effect; legal texts mainly impose obligations, authorize rights and prescribe prohibitions. In the aspect of grammar, legal texts prefer simple present tense to express general legal actions, and long complicated sentences to express the complete legal concept.Due to its specialty as a variety, legal translation not only demands legal translators'profound translation skills but also their plenty of knowledge of the law. To some degree, legal translators play the same important role as legal drafters. But as Chen Zhongcheng, a renowned legal translator in China says in his book that there are quite lots of errors that should have been avoided in legal translation, for example: common errors made by non-professionals, redundancy and distortion.Beyond doubt, the role of legal translators influences, to some extent, the quality of the translated legal texts. Traditionally legal translators acted as a mediator between text producers and receivers. It was not until the twentieth century that the legal translator succeeded in converting his/her passive role in the communication process into an active one. With new powers and responsibilities, legal translators have to master more knowledge of law, to be familiar with the format and features of the legal texts, and to pay more attention to the linguistic features of the legal texts. When translating legal texts, legal translators have to consider how to deal with every non-equivalent aspect between two languages and legal systems. Only by doing this, the translation version of the legal text can reach the same legal effect and regulate people's conduct.
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