Comparative Study Of English-Chinese Legal Terms And Their Translation

Legal language is a functional variety of common language with a specific vocabulary, which is formed and adopted in the activities of legislation, judicature and even the enforcement of the law. Legal language has a great number of special terms, which makes a notable feature to distinguish legal language from other forms of languages. Of course, these features also exist in legal language and legal terms of English and Chinese. Therefore, the translation quality of the whole legal text is decided by the correct translation of legal terms. However, it is not so easy to make a correct translation of legal terms because many factors are related to it. The translator has to grasp not only proficient skills of shift in both the source language and target language, but also adequate knowledge and master of the respective legal terms behind such legal languages in the process of legal translation. It is these difficulties and influential factors in the process of legal translation that makes the author set about comparative study on legal terms between English and Chinese and offering some principles and strategies on legal terms'translation.This paper talks about the translation of legal terms from the perspective of comparative analysis between English and Chinese, at first, it introduces various basic theories of translation of translators in China and elsewhere, such as Yan Fu, Tytler and Nida, and the employments of these theories in legal translation, and then lists the evolution and structure and their basic features of the legal terms in English and Chinese, and elaborates the three basic principles of legal terms'translation: accuracy, unitarity and standardization of speech. At last, on basis of the distinctions of modes of thinking and the differences of legal cultures between Chinese and English, this paper provides the three translation strategies of legal terms: use of functional equivalents; repetition of legal terms and explanatory translation, with the purpose to offering some help for the achievements of good translation.It is of great theoretical and practical significance that the theories of translation, features of legal terms in English and Chinese, principles of translation, and strategies of translation can be employed in the translation of legal terms, which both makes the translators understand legal terms better in source language and find their correspondences easier in target language. Better translation can cause good exchanges in the fields of politics, economy and culture favorable to every country in the world. This paper hopes that more data can be gotten for much further studies to the translation of legal terms between English and Chinese.