Difficulties In Legal Translation: From The Perspective Of Cultural Turn

A loud voice that translation is difficult echoes among the practitioners and scholars in the field of translation, especially in the field of legal translation, the main causation of which lies in that legal language is definitely a kind of unique professional language, the inherent eliteness of which is the main barrier to translators. It goes without saying that cultural elements are also a barrier to translation. And viewing translation from the cross-cultural perspective, it is not difficult to make a verdict that cultural elements may pose major obstacles in the translating process, and especially in legal translation process which is heavily dependent on legal cultures transformation.As is well-known, legal translation is a kind of cross-cultural communication, so legal translation involves different legal cultural interactions. Legal translation is a kind of bilingual activity that relates to two main aspects: legal language and culture. Ambiguity or misunderstanding will inevitably be caused if we do legal translation without consideration of the inherent cultural connotations behind relevant legal languages. This author meditates from the perspective of culture with the purpose to expose the implicit cultural difficulties in legal translation through a contrastive research of legal concepts, legal glossaries, structures of legal text etc. What the author really endeavors to do is to piece the veil of the difficulty of legal translation so as to inspire the translators and learners.Apart from the introduction and conclusion, this thesis is mainly composed of two parts. In the first part, the author, setting out from the relations among language, culture and translation, analyzes how to materialize the cultural intension of legal terms, the characteristics of legal concepts, legal systems and legal glossaries under different cultural backgrounds. In the second part, this thesis is aimed to propose the strategies for solving the cultural difficulties in the process of legal translation. Plain English employed to solve cultural barriers in legal translation is also observed in this thesis.