The Linguistic Features Of English Legal Texts From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory And Their Implications For Translation

Since joining the World Trade Organization, China's commercial exchange with other countries has become more and more frequent. In the meantime, the construction of national democracy and the legal system in our country is improving in this international context. In this frequent communication, there are a large number of disputes arising in the trade between China and other countries. The reason largely comes from the misinterpretation of legal contracts which cause misunderstanding among business partners. Therefore, the translation studies of legal texts have become more pressing up. Judging the situation, the focus of the thesis is to discuss the translation of legal texts from the perspective of Relevance Theory.The first step of studying translation of legal texts is to study the translation of legal terminology, and secondly the translation of sentences. This is because the translator's understanding of terminology and the translation of sentences determines the quality of translated legal texts. On the basis of researches of other scholars, this paper illustrates the characteristics of legal English from the perspective of Relevance Theory, and then discusses its theoretical implications for the translation of legal texts. Moreover, the thesis uses the method of comparison analysis to compare the difference between words in common English and legal texts so as to illustrate that the translation of legal texts can choose the interpretive method of translation. And finally, the conclusion of this thesis is that under the guidance of Relevance Theory the translation of legal texts should use the interpretive method to explicitly express the original texts' communicative intention so as to facilitate the readers'comprehension.This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter introduces the background information of the translation of legal texts and Relevance Theory in translation studies. The second chapter describes the theoretical framework associated with Relevance Theory and explains its development in China. Chapter three not only illustrates the linguistic features of the English legal texts from the perspective of vocabulary and sentence patterns, but also gives an insight into the theoretical development of translation of legal texts, as well as its researches in China. Finally, this chapter discusses problems in the process of translation of legal English texts. Chapter four is a combination of theory and corpus. Based on the analysis of the first three chapters, this part analyzes the implications of Relevance Theory for the translation of English legal texts from the angle of both vocabulary and sentence patterns, which explains that translators should use compensation strategies to make the meaning of the original texts manifest. Chapter five is conclusion, which summarizes the previously mentioned arguments and points out that under the guidance of Relevance Theory translators should use interpretive method to facilitate the comprehension of target readers'.