C-E Legal Translation: Functional Equivalence Perspective

At Present, legal translation exerts the influence on our life with the increasing international cooperation. The great significance of legal translation lies not only in the academic area, but also in the political, economic and social areas. Legal translation needs both much practice and guiding translation theories. Eugene A. Nida's functional equivalence theory is one of the most widely accepted theories among many theories proposed by the scholars in the East and West.Although many scholars at home and abroad have done much research on legal translation in recent years, there are still lots of issues worth discussion and further research on legal translation. Meanwhile, China's legal construction has been improved quickly, which makes the needs for legal translation increasing , especially the needs for Chinese-English translation. The study of Chinese-English legal translation will become an important research topic. Therefore, great importance should be attached to Chinese-Englishlegal translation. The Tort Law, which composes one of the important components of the Civil Law, plays a significant role in protecting the legitimate rights and interests of parties in civil law relationships and promoting the social harmony and stability. The author analyzes the merits and defects in the English version of the Tort Law of the People's Republic of China from functional equivalence perspective. This thesis aims to explore the existing problems, regularities and experimental skills. After comparing with different English versions, the author chose the English version published by the Wellslaw website as a case study.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is an introduction of research background, significance, purpose, the Tort Law of the People's Republic of China and importance of its English version. Chapter Two briefly reviews legal translation theories at home and abroad. Chapter Three presents the overview of Nida's functional equivalence theory. In light of Nida's functional equivalence theory, the author tentatively proposes five principles of legal translation: principle of preciseness, principle of conciseness, principle of formalness, principle of consistency, and principle of creativity. Chapter Four is the main body of this thesis. The author analyzes the English version of TLPRC from functional equivalence perspective. Some merits and defects in the English version are pointed out through abundant examples. The author also tentatively proposes some improvements. Chapter Five is the conclusive part. Finally, it is concluded that functional equivalence theory can effectively guide Chinese-English legal translation, and the application of the functional equivalence theory to legal translation contributes to improving the legal translation quality. Meanwhile, the limitations of this study are summarized and some suggestions for future study are put forward.