Legal Translation Strategies: A Perpsective Of Legal Rhetoric

The English language enjoys a long history, in which various rhetorical devices emerged to enrich its expressions. Rhetoric, reading between the lines, shows not only the attractiveness of the language but also the wits and inspiration of the writer.With its entry into the World Trade Organization, China will involve itself in the world's economy more profoundly and widely. In the contemporary highly legalized society, laws are closely concerned with people's economic activities. Overseas investors in China need to learn about China's laws, and to conform to the international business practice, while China also needs to learn other countries'laws. Thus to know the stylistic features of syntax in legal English, which is closely related to legal rhetoric, is of great significance to learners of legal English and those who are fond of legal English. Of course, lawyers, judges and legal translators are included.With legal rhetorical expressions, the author of the original text would have injected his/her lifetime experiments or spirits into his/her work to figure out what would be behind that expression, or what linguistic functions the rhetorical expression would play, and to display great importance in the relevant research or study which often appears to challenge the translator's wits. So, a simple reference to the bilingual dictionary is far from enough for the target reader or the translator to achieve perfect understanding of the rhetorical expressions in the source text.Nowadays, both in China and abroad, few books or articles can be found discussing legal syntax and its stylistic features, still less comprehensive and concrete relevant research accomplishments. This thesis attempts a systematic analysis of legal rhetoric, and particularly tends to examine the translation strategies concerning with the features of rhetoric in a more specific way.The whole thesis, plus the introduction and the conclusion, consists of five parts.Chapter one is a brief introduction to rhetoric and its relevant principles and legal English.Chapter two outlines various definitions of rhetoric and this author's definition is also covered. Furthermore, the relationship between rhetoric and other subjects, such as phonetics, grammar, semantics, logic and style is also observed here. And then, the highest principle of rhetoric is discussed.In Chapter Three, legal rhetoric and its characteristics are dwelled on from three aspects, i.e. rhetoric at lexical level, rhetoric at syntactical level and rhetoric at discourse level. Rhetoric at lexical level is concerned with archaic words, technical terms, word repetition and vague words. Rhetoric at syntactical level is related with parallelism, passive voice, long sentences, nominalization and legal habitual expression. Definition, enumeration and quotation are included in rhetoric in discourse. Furthermore, other rhetoric devices in legal English are also introduced in the passage.Chapter Four discusses the translation strategies from the perspective of legal rhetoric. Legal English is of course defined at first and then translation strategies are dealt with. In the process of translation of legal English rhetoric devices,translation strategies such as omission,retaining,conversion and flexible application can be adopted.Chapter Five is the conclusion of this thesis.