A Study Of Pragmatic Equivalence Realization In The English Translation Of Chinese Legislative Texts: An Adaptation Perspective

As legal translation is evolving with the assistance of linguistic theories, translation practice becomes more scientifically oriented and manipulatively smooth. Particularly when pragmatic translation is introduced to achieve the equivalence between the source and the target languages across cultural and societal boundaries, it is thus valued to credit the goal of translation. In the present study, pragmatic equivalence is meant to be approached from the perspective of the Theory of Linguistic Adaptation which is known to manifest the essential characteristics of language use in a cognitive, social and cultural way.With the exemplification of the English translations of some existing Chinese legislative provisions, the paper makes a qualitative study on the way in which the instrumentality of adaptation is realized for pragmatic equivalence in light of the parameters of adaptation. The study also conducts exploration in the antithesis of pragmatic equivalence—pragmatic failure. Via adaptation, the author wishes to see that appropriate corrections can be made to those failures. Specifically, the study makes some discoveries: (1) In the English translation of Chinese legislative texts, translator plays as a combiner of the parameters of adaptation and the instrumentality of adaptation. He is both an adaptor to the parameters and a chooser of linguistic choices. (2) In the translation procedure, the instrumentality is realized in accordance with the parameters, with generally one parameter being more prominent than another. (3) Pragmatic failure is a consequence of failure to adapt to one or more of the parameters of adaptation. In order to revise it, translator must analyze all the information before finding out the most prominent parameter it has failed to adapt to.In the study, fresh attempts are made to step across different social conventions and cultural backgrounds with an aim to achieve pragmatic equivalence. It is meanwhile hoped that the framework of the thesis serves as a model to achieve pragmatic equivalence, to revise pragmatic failures and to offer some inspiration to legal translators.