The Translation Of Legal Documents

It is without doubt that law has been playing and will continue to play a vital role in the society of human beings. Law affects every aspect of people's life around the world. Its significance is reflected in that people all behave in a regulated manner, since law tells them what rights they are entitled to and what obligations they must abide by, what kind of remedy they have right to pursue if their rights are breached and what kind of legal consequence they have to face if they fail to comply with law.Language and law are two closely related subjects, thus it is said that law is a profession of vocabulary, or that the most significant problem concerning law lies in the language. Language is the carrier of law, the tool of legal thoughts. The essence of the legal culture includes legal framework, legislation, legal value and so on. So the theoretical framework of legal translation must build upon language, or more precisely upon legal language. Therefore translators of legal documents must not only know the necessary translation theories and techniques, but also have a good grasp of law, law culture and vocabulary features of both the source language and the target language.The aim of this thesis is to provide practical guidelines; the emphasis is on the identification and solution of problems that actually arise in this area of specialized translation. With this in mind, I have grouped the contents into four chapters. Chapter One deals with legal English as a linguistic system and contains pointers to the leading features of that system. Chapter Two is devoted to the application of the equivalence theory to the legal translation, Chapters Three and Four complete the methodological picture with analysis of the linguistic and stylistic resources available to the translator of legal texts. The issues covered in this section include the need for awareness of semantic fields and collocations, and the practical application to legal translation of familiar techniques such as transposition, modulation and expansion.Legal English usually use archaic, formal, redundant language and performative verbs, it prefers long sentences and passive voice with conditionals and hypothetical formulations. The questions of equivalence are especially problematic in the field of legal translation, semantic equivalence is an essential prerequisite for effective translation. In a specialist field like legal translation, the translator must expect to have to cope with alien modes of thought and unfamiliar conceptualizations of the underlying subject-matter as well as performing the more obvious task of wresting the original terms and syntax into a shape acceptable to users of the target language. All of this means that translators of this particular type of text must add continuously to their stock of knowledge of legal terminology and procedure in both systems as well as replenishing their linguistic repertoire. Techniques like transposition, expansion ad modulation are also of great help in practice. In a word, in the process of legal translation, translators must pay special attention to the linguistic feature, voice, lexical type of the original text, adhere to the principle of semantic equivalence and apply appropriate techniques of translation.