On Translation Of Legal Terms: From The Perspective Of Legal Semantic Fields

Nowadays, legal translation has come to the increasing attention of researchers as well as practitioners both in the fields of law and linguistics. In view of the critical status that legal terminology holds in the language system of law, translation of legal terms is usually deemed the most important component of legal translation, and whether a legal term is correctly or precisely translated or not is usually considered as one of those decisive factors that may exert great influence on the quality of legal translation.However, due to the inherent complexity of legal terminology as well as some translators'ignorance of the relations between legal terms, there often emerges, in the process of legal terminology translation, some errors and pretermissions that might severely frustrate a translator in his/her ambitious attempt. Among these factors, ignorance of the relations between legal terms is held the most detrimental one to the understanding of legal terms and ultimately to their translations'accuracy and appropriateness. Furthermore, translation theories and logics that have so far been applied to the field of legal translation for the purpose of improving preciseness of legal terminology translation, seem mostly more applicable to literature translation rather than legal translation.Therefore, by resorting to abundant semantic doctrines instead of other translation theories, the present study intends to observe the theory of semantic fields, one that concentrates on lexical relations, analyze the legal lexical system and finally establish a rather comprehensive theoretical framework of legal semantic fields including its definition, taxology and features. In accordance with the basic tenets of the theory of semantic fields, the term"legal semantic fields"is defined here as the organization of related legal terms, a system which shows their relationship to one another and the influence that this kind of relationship exerts upon the meanings of them. Generally, there are three types of legal semantic fields, i.e. the paradigmatic, syntagmatic and associative legal semantic fields, among which the paradigmatic legal semantic fields are further divided into six genres, namely, legal hyponymy, legal synonymy, legal antonymy, legal homonymy, legal polysemy and legal meronymy. And the five features that legal semantic fields possess, i.e. hierarchy, relativity, interlacement, variability, and nationality, are also elaborated on in this thesis.Lastly, for the purpose of justifying the application of the theory of legal semantic fields to the translation of legal terms, a large number of examples selected from both legal Chinese and legal English are afforded and concerning issues are detailed. It is finally concluded that different genres of legal semantic fields do exert certain influence upon the translation of legal terms, and a full consideration and better understanding of the lexical relations between legal terms in the same legal semantic field is bound to conduce to accuracy and strictness of their translation.