Archaic Words In Legal English And Their Translation

As a special kind of language, legal English is different from common-core English in many aspects, and there are many special demands on word use and sentence structures for legal English. The application of archaic words is one of the lexical characteristics of legal English. Once the lexical characteristics of legal English are mentioned, the application of archaic words must be included. Archaic words in legal English are widely studied by laymen and researchers. With the development of legal English, more and more people expressed their objections to some fixed structures and words which existed for a long time in legal languages, in which the application of archaic words is included. Despite the efforts exerted by the professors and scholars in the Plain English Movement, the archaic words do not disappear from legal English, but still permeate the legal documents and play increasing important roles in legal language and becomes a special symbol of legal English.Recently, the communication between different countries is more and more frequent, and the translation of legal language is studied by many scholars and researchers who have devoted themselves to legal translation and proposed some feasible translation skills and strategies. But the study for the translation of archaic words is very limited, so this paper mainly studies the archaic words in legal English from the classifications, meanings and functions of archaic words to illustrate the existing necessity of these archaic words. The translation of these archaic words also will be illustrated and some proper translation strategies will be proposed in the present paper.Based on some introductory rewards about the legal English and the English to Chinese translation practices, this thesis attempts to make a study on the principles of legal English to Chinese in order to find the proper translation principles for the translation of archaic words, that are, the principle of faithfulness, principle of accuracy, smoothness, consistency, and principle of clarity and concision. Furthermore, based on all of these translation principles, some general translation strategies in legal translation are discussed, and then the author finds some proper translation strategies for the translation of archaic words, including, using proper Chinese old equivalents, detachment, detachment and blending, detachment and restituting combined with blending, expansion and conversion.