Pragmatic Enrichment In Legal Terms Translation

In the area of translation,pragmatic enrichment refers to a process during which translators,based on the context,enrich various information gap so as to minimize inferential efforts paid by the audience and to achieve optimal relevance between the utterance and the context.There might be different understandings toward one utterance due to the audience's different cognitive environments.Therefore,it is quite necessary for translators to select a particular contextual assumption based on the context.The concept of "pragmatic enrichment" emerges from lexical pragmatics,which is a relatively new topic that deserves our attention.During the past two decades, pragmatics has been playing a growingly important role in translation.Relevance theory is a theory for cognition and communication,while translation is an activity about cognition and communication.Therefore,Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory is highly explanatory in translation.To enrich a legal term in translation is to find information of optimal relevance,so as to let target readers pay minimal cognitive effort to get maximal cognitive effect.Based on an analysis of legal terms collected from a wide range of legislative documents,both from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English,this thesis first summarizes the major difficulties in legal terms translation,and then shows that there are mainly four types of pragmatic enrichment in legal terms translation,i.e.,(1) pragmatic narrowing for polysemy,(2) pragmatic enrichment for highly summarized terms,(3) pragmatic enrichment for pragmalinguistic information,and(4) pragmatic enrichment for the gap between legal systems.