A Study On Cohesion Theory To Chinese Legislative Texts Translation To English

With the continuous development of China's reform and opening up, the increasingly frequent interactive communication between China and foreign countries, and the increasing need of attracting foreign capital and developing national economy, more and more Chinese legislative texts have been translated into foreign languages, especially English. In recent years, many Chinese scholars have been aware of the importance of doing researches on legal languages, and they do have done a lot of researches on legal language from many perspectives such as diction, syntax, and style, and there have been studies combining researches on legal language and legal translation together. However, to make a general survey of all the studies on legal translation in our country, it is easy to see that there aren't many ones on parallel texts of legal languages based on Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory. Therefore, this paper attempts to investigate the characteristics of cohesion in Chinese legislative texts and C-E translation of cohesive devices on the basis of a qualitative contrastive analysis between English and Chinese.The author first carries out a literature review on cohesion, translation of legislative texts as well as the related multidisciplinary researches of both fields, and stresses the importance of cohesion in the understanding of the original text and the reconstruction of coherence in the target text during translation. This paper adopts the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan as the theoretical basis and analytical tool to conduct a detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis on selective Chinese legislative texts and their English translation versions from five perspectives, namely reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion, aiming at figuring out the following two research questions:(1) the characteristics of the cohesive distribution in CLT and their parallel ETV; (2) strategies which can be adopted in the C-E translation of cohesive devices. The linguistic data in the present study consists of four Chinese legislative texts together with their English versions picked up from the Chinese-English bilingual law education series published by China Legal Publishing House in 2007.The author comes to the following conclusions based on the empirical study:(1) Generally speaking, Chinese legislative texts are much less explicit than their English versions in terms of the types of cohesive devices and their frequency, such as the avoidance of personal references, frequent use of "zero-anaphora" and implicit logical relations. Additionally, this result is consistent with that in common languages; (2) Due to their unique textual features, such as accuracy and preciseness, conciseness and clearness. impersonality and formality, legislative texts also present their own distinctive features which are different from the general conclusion mentioned above, such as more occurrence of nominal substitution and repetition in some fixed sentence structures; (3) According to the cohesive features of Chinese legislative texts, several adoptable translation strategies for cohesive devices in Chinese legislative texts are summarized, e.g. preservation, omission, addition, and shift, as well as the available situations for these strategies by referring to the cohesive features and ways of expression of English.The author believes that a precise understanding and grasp of the cohesive features of Chinese legislative texts together with the skillful application of corresponding translation strategies, is of a quite positive theoretical and practical significance on consolidating the theoretical foundation in the translation field of Chinese legislative texts and improving the translation quality.