A Corpus-based Assessment Of Legal Text Translation From The Aspect Of Legal Cultural Differences

From the perspective of legal cultural differences, this thesis explores the legal cultural differences which will influence the legal text translation, and the causes of the influence. By using Juliane House's Model for Translation Quality Assessment, the comparison between the source text and its translation is done from the aspects of field (subjective matter and social action), tenor (participant relationship which includes the author's provenance and stance, social role relationship and social attitude), mode (medium and participation), and genre (text type and format). The tags of the legal texts and their translations are based on discourse information theory and the legal discourse information processing model. Combining House's model and information processing model, the author transforms the elements of field, tenor and mode into different parameters in the discourse information processing model.By comparing the tags of different types of legal texts and their translations, this thesis finds the different information flow which is affected by differences between western and Chinese legal culture, and the strategies these translations used to convey these legal cultural differences. Based on the theoretical framework adapted from Juliane House's model, translations of the different legal text types is assessed under the legal culture context.The present study on the assessment of legal translation text from the perspective of legal cultural differences may arouse the translators attention on the legal cultural differences when translating legal texts, may find out the legal cultural differences which exert great influence on legal translation, and may find out useful strategies of translating legal cultural differences for future legal translations.