| It goes without saying that law is becoming more and more important in modern society.Since China's accession to WTO,communication among countries in politics, economics and culture increases gradually,so translation of laws and regulations between Chinese and English has been of great importance.Legal document is highly impersonal and decontextualized,in the sense that its illocutionary force holds independently of whoever is the "speaker"(originator) or the "hearer"(reader) of the document(Bhatia, 1983:46).Legal documents usually specify the obligations as well as rights of the parties concerned,which result in the adoption of an authoritative language."Legal English is the most formal in all English styles"(侯维瑞,1988:24).Compared with other structures, nominalization may express comparatively great information within a comparatively simple grammatical structure,and they enjoy increasing application in legal documents. Nominalization is assumed to be one of the effective means in achieving clear conveyance of the stipulations.Mr.Lian Shuneng and Mr.Liu Miqing,experts in English-Chinese contrastive study, have proposed in their works such an idea that there is a predominance of nouns in the English language.It can be easily recognized that predominance of nouns is a commonly-found phenomenon in English language.And in English there are a great number of abstract nouns and many meaning-weakening devices,nominalization,which is considered as one linguistic device of this kind,prevails especially in legal documents. However,it is a pity that there has been an absence of profound and systematic theory typical of legal document translation.Although Mr.Chen Zhongcheng has contributed a lot to legal document translation and his translation is really appreciable,but it is a pity that he has few works on the theory of legal document translation.This paper aims to exam the application of English nominalization to legal document translation through an English-Chinese contrastive study,which is consisted of five chapters.So,the paper starts with an introduction and literature review about nominalization and legal English and it is mainly a summary of established work and previous study of different linguistic scholars,which lay a foundation for a detailed illustration of nominalization in Chapter 3.Chapter 3 will give a survey of the application of nominalization in legal English,and provide some linguistic features of legal documents,some linguistic techniques commonly employed in legal English,and functions of nominalization in legal documents are also illustrated.The central chapter of the paper is Chapter 4,and this chapter tries to illustrate English nominalization and its application to the translation of legal documents from Chinese to English.And this chapter also gives a brief introduction of some translation theories,which explains the author's proposal to nominalize Chinese verbs or phrases or clauses when translating Chinese legal documents into English version.In this chapter some translation strategies are also given and nominalization structures are classified into five typical patterns according to its different structures:(1.) Noun.+nominalization;(2.) Nominalization +preposition.+noun;(3.) Adjective.+nominalization;(4.) Preposition.+nominalization; and(5.)Verb.+nominalization.The dissertation ends with a brief,but important conclusion.Although this paper cannot make great contributions to the establishment of a systematic theory concerning legal document translation,it will be a great honor if this dissertation can throw some light on legal document translation.
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