Lexical Gaps In Legal Terms Translation: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach

It is obvious that each legal discourse has its own specificity with its cultural, political, social and historical events, which deeply influenced and still influence the legal language. Indeed, statutes and cases are mainly connected with ethical, philosophical, cultural and even religious reflections which are specific to each culture, to each nation; and so which seem difficult to express and translate faithfully in the TT. Furthermore, legal translation is all the more complex as the SL and TL are never in the same space and time, or under the same circumstances.Legal terms or terms of art, usually refer to objects, relationships, acts, and procedures that are peculiar to a particular national legal system. As a product of different institutions, history, culture, and sometimes socio-economic principles, each legal system has its own legal reality and thus its own conceptual system and even knowledge structure.In legal translation, a problem arises from the very beginning if the translator aims at finding the exact terminological equivalent. It is mainly due to the inherent incongruency of legal terras (i.e. legal lexical gaps) between legal systems. The legal terminologies of different legal systems are, for the most part, conceptually incongruent. And precision is one of the most main pursuits of legal language. The attribution of an improper equivalent to a legal term can be the cause of ambiguities, confusion and all types of miscomprehension due to the effect the term in question produces on the reader of the translated text.In legal terms translation practice, mistranslation or improper translations are not uncommon due to a lack of guidance of proper theories, principles, and methods.Up to now, the issue of legal terms translation between Chinese and English has drawn much attention. A large part of studies are on the causes, classification and specific methods of lexical gap in legal terms translation from the perspectives of cultural linguistics, semantics, comparative law, equivalence and so on. Few, if any, have ever tried to study the cognitive process of legal translators in translating, i.e. what happens to the translator in his or her decision-making process. Not to mention what kind of principles or guidance can be followed by translators. The present study attempts to examine the translator's mental process in the translation of legal terms from the perspective of relevance principle in order to provide a systematic explanation of the phenomenon at issue.For this purpose, researches in relevance theory and translation studies are employed to facilitate the analysis of the process of legal terms translation. And a relevance-theoretic approach to translation of legal lexical gaps is formulated. In this paradigm, the translation of legal lexical gaps is seen as a relevance-seeking double ostensive-inferential process. The translator searches for relevance in the source cognitive environment and makes dynamic choices in the target cognitive environment. In the process, the legal translator mobilizes his cognitive resources available and develops his subjectivity to search for the optimal relevance in the source cognitive environment and to make linguistic choices in the target cognitive environment. The translator's linguistic choices and translation strategies must focus on the conveying of the author's intentions without putting the audience to unnecessary processing efforts in achieving the contextual effects in the interpretation intended by the author. This is the nature of the process of legal terms translation. And optimal relevance is the fundamental principle, under the guidance of which legal translator make flexible choices among various translation strategies.However, the dynamic choices of the translator are not without constraints. There are two constraints on his or her choices: consistency and conventionality. Consistency means that the translation of a legal term should be in adherence to an existing version in authoritative texts, although the translator believes that his or her translation may be better. Conventionality refers to cases in which a translated term is theoretically considered as improper, but it has been used again and again so that it is well-internalized among the target language lawyers.