Constraints Of Legal Translation To Legal Translators

Since politics,economy and culture are on a globalization trend,legal translation that is closely concerned with them is absorbing more and more attention.However,the study of legal translation is rather underdeveloped.Actually,under the principle of special Skopos,legal translation can be deemed a communicative process among different legal systems.Therefore,the legal translator must be strictly constrained,and s/he is not only an inter-lingual transferor but also a communicator of legal thoughts and concepts,who can convey the intended legal effects.This thesis introduces the characteristics of the legal language and legal translation as well as translation theories,especially Skopos in legal fields.By integrating the macro-level functionalist theories of translation study with micro-level legal translation practice,this thesis conducts the primary research on the constraint of the legal translator.Guiding by the linguistic approach,the traditional legal translation study tends to pursue the loyalty to the source text by concentrating on the equivalence on the wording level,which means to set "equivalence" as the criterion for legal translation.However,it is more idealistic than realistic.Therefore,this thesis turns to the functionalism which highlights a more practical criterion of "adequacy," i.e.the translation should be "adequate to" the Skopos theory,the overall purpose of the translational communicative action,and hence emphasizes the constraint of purpose of the legal text to the translator.The thesis indicates that the functional approaches can not only apply to general translation practice,but also has influence on the legal translation.Within the framework of functionalist theory,this study discovers that the legal translator has to go through a process consisting of hierarchical stages,from pragmatic to lexical,or in terms of translation practice,from identification of the overall Skopos of a translational action to language disposal.There are constraints of the highest hierarchy,Skopos and loyalty, which function throughout the whole translating process.And there are also constraints of lower hierarchy,such as at the source text syntax,grammatical conventions of the target language,the source text function,the source-text sender's real intent,the interpersonal relationship between the translator and other agents,etc.,which only work under some circumstance at certain stage of the translating process.Generally,this thesis is composed of three parts.Chapter One and Chapter Two can be classified as the first part which presents current situation of legal translation studies, existing problems,objectives of the present study,prior studies of legal translation, functionalist approaches to translation as well as the changing role of translator.The second part includes Chapter Three to Chapter Five,examining the legal translational action from following five aspects:1) general characteristics of legal translational action;2) legal translating as a purpose-driven translational action;3) a source text particularity in the translational action;4) the role of translators in the legal translational action;and 5) the top principle in legal translational action:Skopos plus loyalty;presenting distinctive qualities of a legal text and the notion of legal equivalence; providing the functionalist approaches to legal translation and discussing the constraints of legal translation to the legal translator,which includes the following parts:dual functional equivalence and qualities of legal translators,legal translators guided by the principle of dual functional equivalence;legal translator's identification of the Skopoes theory of legal translational action and the legal translator's analysis of legal target-text function.Chapter Six provides the last part of the study,in which the author re-emphasizes the constraints of the translator in legal translation while the subjectivity of the translator is widely claimed,and suggests that within the framework of functionalist,legal translators should be tightly restricted.All their decisions should serve for the function of the legal text and the purpose of the legal translation.It is hoped that the primary research done in this thesis can be attributable to the study of legal translators and legal translation theories.