On Legal Language And Legal Translation

Since the reform and opening up, China's foreign exchanges have been considerably expanded, and the legal construction in our country has also been improved at an amazing speed. Under such a circumstance, the research on legal language and legal translation has been receiving more and more attention. Especially after China's accession to the World Trade Organization, the discussion on the English-Chinese translation of the legal documents of China's WTO entry further makes the legal translation a social focus.The study of legal translation should be based upon that of legal language, for legal language boasts its distinguished characteristics compared with other professional languages.Starting from these features, taking advantage of the translation theory, the thesis analyzes the techniques and approaches to translate the legal texts, which is composed of five chapters. Setting the tone for the interdisciplinary nature of this study, chapter one provides basic information on legal language and legal translation, pointing the significance of studying them. Chapter two presents the features of legal language, distinguishing legal texts from other texts and showing why legal language is special. Chapter three contains a comprehensive analysis of the theory of legal translation, Chapter four puts forward the approaches to legal translation. And ChapterIVfive lists the translation errors of legal terms in several authoritative legal dictionaries published in our country during the past decade, trying to make a tentative analysis of these errors, and to find out the reasons leading to them.Legal translation is interdisciplinary in nature, which requires not only competent translation skills but also profound legal knowledge. Therefore, the writing of this thesis is far from an easy task. Yet thanks to the guidance and advice of Professor Zhou Yi, I have managed to fulfill the paper smoothly in the end.