Study On Equivalence Of C-E Legislative Text Translation

Cohesion theory is seldom used to test the equivalence of legal text translation. Besides,legislative text,as a special genre,has its own characteristics.It is not enough to analyze the equivalence of C-E legislative text translation by cohesion theory the same way as other translation versions do.Therefore,this paper endeavours to analyze the equivalence of the C-E legislative text translation by cohesion under the guidance of two criteria to ensure the quality of the versions.Based on the above theories,this paper employs a qualitative method and a descriptive method to test the C-E legislative text translation.With the theoretical framework proposed herein,this paper carries a detailed statistics on a number of legislative versions and finds different degree of nonequivalence exist in the cohesive devices:subjective mistakes,unidentification of the same words,abuse of references, neglect of logical connectors and misunderstanding of substitution and ellipsis.The analysis reveals that cohesion theory combining the two criteria is an effective means to test translation equivalence.The translation of legislative texts still desires plenty of room for improvement.Though the theoretical framework is specifically designed to evaluate the translation quality of legislative provisions,it may hopefully shed some light on similar studies of translation equivalence test of different legal texts.