Translation Of Legislative Texts: A Constructivist Perspective

In the contemporary world,as the communication between states,regions, governmental or non-governmental organizations,or even between civilians from different countries is increasing day by day,relevant legal problems arise frequently, as a result of which legal translation becomes an indispensable means of international communication.The study of translation theories dates back to the ancient periods,and many of them have been applied to the translation practice.The constructivist translation theory,as one of the emerging schools in modern translation theories,is to be applied to the translation practice of legislative texts in this thesis.The constructivism,as a new epistemology,believes it is not the people that find the world.Instead,it is the people who create it in some sense by taking language as a medium.The constructivism considers that any knowledge is co-constructed by the interaction between a society,a culture and an individual.With the communication action theory as its theoretical basis,the constructivist translatology emphasizes consensus theory of truth,communication rationality,takes the practical philosophy as its philosophical basis and the speech act theory as its linguistic basis.As far as the constructivist translation theory is concerned,the translation activity could be considered as a communication action,which should meet the three validity claims:the description of the objective world should be considered true,the depiction of the social world should be considered right,and the representation of the subjective world should be considered sincere.In accordance with the three validity claims,three translation criteria are put forth:obedience of the objectivity of knowledge,rationality of understanding and universal validity of interpretation,and conformity to the directivity of original texts.The author of the thesis believes that the constructivist translation theory could be applied to the translation of legal texts,especially that of legislative texts,as well as the general translation.Due to the authoritativeness and the regulatory function of the legislative texts, fearing that linguistic improvements could affect the substance,translators usually take the easy way and simply reproduce the source text by literal translation.Later on,translators realize that since legislative texts are subject to legal criteria,a theory for the translation of legislative texts must take account of legal considerations. Literal translation may not express the original intent of the legislators and is prone to lead to misunderstanding.In this regard,some theories of the general translation are applied to the translation of legislative texts and all result in some insufficiencies. For instance,Eugene A.Nida's functional equivalence lays great emphasis on the readers' response,while the forms of the texts are relatively neglected;Peter Newmark's semantic and communicative translation fails since there is no consensus on the text typology of the legislative texts based on his classification;Hans J. Vermeer's skopos theory is not applicable to the translation of legislative texts, which belongs to the special-purpose translation,the function of which is usually the same as that of the source text.In the light of the insufficiencies of the application of the general translation to the translation of legislative texts,the author applies the constructivist translation theory to the translation of legislative texts,considering the translation of legislative texts as the communication action within the mechanism of the law:the communication action between legislators,translators,and lawyers.The communication action should meet the three validity claims.Accordingly, the translation of legislative texts should satisfy three criteria.When translating the legislative texts,the translator should obey the objectivity of the legal knowledge; understand the original intent of the legislators,and produce a generally accepted version,which should conform to the directivity of legislative texts.With respect to the three criteria,the obedience of the objectivity of legal knowledge is the most fundamental and essential.To understand the original intent of the legislators,the translator should know how the lawyers interpret the legislative texts.There are two sets of rules guiding the understanding of the legislative texts:the legal rules and the linguistic rules,the latter of which is more important to the translator.While understanding the original legislative texts,the translator should obey at least seven rules,i.e.,the rule against tautology,the rule of reading a document as a whole,the rule of knowing by its associates,the rule of the same class,the rule of negative implication,the rule of rending each to each,and the rule of last modification.In order to be generally accepted,the version should be first and foremost accurate and consistent.With regard to the directivity of the legislative texts,the format and the linguistic features of the English and Chinese legislative texts should be preserved.The constructivist translation theory not only takes the translation of legislative texts out of the literal-meaning-based situation,but also releases it from the conceptual texts and considers it as a communication action between legislators, translators and lawyers.It is workable to take the validity claims of the communication action to guide the actual translation of legislative texts.