English Nouns, English Nouns In The Translation Of Chinese Legal Literature

Mr. Liu Miqing and Mr. Lian Shuneng, experts in English-Chinese contrastive study, mentioned for more than one time in their works that there is a predominance of nouns in the English language. Indeed, predominance of nouns is typical of the English language. There are a great number of abstract nouns and many meaning-weakening devices in English, nominalization, as one linguistic device of this kind, prevails especially in social science works, official articles, newspaper reviews, legislative documents, commercial letters, and so on.With its entry into the WTO, China will involve itself in the world's economy more profoundly and widely. In the contemporary highly legislatized society, laws are closely concerned with people's social and economic activities. Foreigners living and working in China, overseas investors in China need to learn about China's laws to conform to the Chinese society, and to conform to the international business practice. Under the circumstances, translation of Chinese legislative documents into English becomes increasingly necessary and important.But there has been an absence of profound and systematic theory typical of legislative document translation. Mr. Chen Zhongcheng has contributed a lot to legislative document translation. His translation is really appreciable, but it is a pity that he has few works on the theory of legislative document translation.This dissertation is intended to study the application of English nominalization to legislative document translation through an English-Chinese Contrastive Study.The dissertation comprises five chapters and a conclusion. It begins with an introduction and literature review about nominalization and legislative English, which is mainly a summary of established work and previous study. The first two chapters are included here to provide a jumping-off point for a detailed illustration of nominalization in Chapter 3, in which an extensive survey of the application of nominalization in legal English including the agent, the recipient, tense and aspect, voice, negation, number, ambiguity is given. A detailed study of legislative study is presented in Chapter 4, particularly the linguistic features of legislative texts. Chapter 5 presents the results of the study. This can be seen as the central chapter of the dissertation, which tries to illustrate English nominalization and its application to the translation of legislative texts from Chinese to English. Meanwhile, a brief introduction of some translation theories is given, which accounts for the author's proposal to nominalize Chinese verbs or adjectives in the process of the translation of Chinese legislative texts to English version. The following part presents the author's suggested translation strategies by summing up six typical patterns: (1.) n.+Nn;(2.) Nn+Prep.+n.;(3.) Possessive Prons.+ Nn;(4.) adj.+Nn;(5.) Prep.+Nn;and (6.)V.+Nn. The chapter ends up with author's suggestion of avoiding some common errors concerned the application of nominalization in the process of translation oflegislative texts from Chinese to English. Chapter 5, by necessity, the densest of the chapter. The dissertation ends with a brief, but important, conclusion, which succeeds, at least to a certain extent, in bringing together the enormous variety of different paths this study travels upon. Although it cannot contribute much to the establishment of a systematic theory of legislative document translation, the dissertation is, after all, a combined trial study of translation of scientific and technological and business documents. I hope my dissertation can throw some light on legislative document translation.