Translation Of Legal Instruments: From The Functionalist Perspective

With the everlasting and irresistible development of globalization, the past three decades witnessed a growing dominance of China's economy and culture over other parts of the world. In the international economic activities, Sino-foreign communication in the field of law is involved and gaining speed day by day. Therefore, for the convenience of such communication, translation of legal instruments plays an important part. It is safe to say that the loss or gain of economic profits are partially depend on the correct translation of involving legal instruments.However, it is not easy for translators to produce a absolutely satisfactory translation of legal instruments because it involves three fields of academic studies, i.e. the law, linguistics and translation. None of these fields is easy to grasp. As a result, in contrast with the great demand of translation of legal instruments, the research and producing of them lagged far behind. At present, many translators and legal professionals both at home and abroad focus on the research of this domain from various perspectives and also put forward a lot of contributing principles and proposals for legal translation.But if we refer to those research fruits, we can figure out two problems: one concerns the research subject, i.e. most of the previous researches focus on the micro elements such as lexicon or syntax of legal instruments and their translation, in this respect, micro-equivalence is constantly emphasized while text function and translation purpose are ignored; the other problem is about research system, the status quo of translation of legal instruments shows the absence of systematical research of legal instruments translation. Translators and legal professionals put most of their attention to the letters of the law and how to preserve them, seldom do they think of the construction of a new discipline for legal translation which comprises a complete system of classification and methodology of all legal translation problems. This partial perspective inevitably leads to the inaccurate, unprofessional or mechanical translation of legal instruments. As mentioned previously, legal translation involves three fields of academic studies, therefore, systematical and interdisciplinary research on legal translation, especially translation of legal instruments is in urgent need.Some scholars hold that legal language is a special sort of language and therefore general translation theories are incapable of explaining legal translation. Is this true? The author of this thesis holds that functionalist translation theory can be applicable to the translation of legal instruments. Among modern translation theories in western countries, the functionalist translation theory breaks through traditional equivalence-based linguistic translation theories and provides a new perspective for translation practice. It can not only explain literary translation, but can also solve the problem confronted by non-literary translation.In the light of theories proposed by functionalists, the author of this thesis is devoted to find out the applicability of functionalist translation theory to translation of legal instruments, therefore, this thesis is comprised of five chapters, and they are:Chapter one: introduction to translation of legal instruments. The definition and classification of legal instruments are given in this chapter. Besides, the status quo of translation of legal instruments both at home and abroad is introduced.Chapter two is the theoretical framework of this thesis. Functionalist translation theory is introduced for the use of translation of legal instruments.Chapter three is the body part of this thesis; it mainly concerns the application of functionalist translation theory to the translation of legal instruments. In this chapter, the text type and skopos of legal instrument translation are analyzed, and examples are given to show how functionalist translation theory works in legal instruments translation practice.Chapter four provides several useful principles to guide the translation practice of legal instruments.Chapter five is the conclusion of the whole thesis.