Cultural Discrepancy In The Translation Of Legal Terminology

Legal translation as an important medium of legal communication amongdifferent countries has a long history and globalization increases its influence and rolein the multilingual era. Legal translation in our country now has a large number withdifferent quality. Exploring the theory and practice of legal translation is significant.Rigorous and accurate are the most prominent features of legal translation whichdemands the translation not only satisfying the features of target legal language butalso saving the implication of source text. Legal terminology is the fundamental unitof legal language and its translation influences the quality of legal translation. Legallanguage is the product of culture, which is influenced deeply by politics, society,history, custom, etc. of certain legal system. Some legal terminologies of differentlegal systems can not achieve complete equivalence because of cultural discrepancywhich needs the translator depending on the reality to employ the correspondingtranslating methods to translate the appropriate meaning of them.Sarcevic’s“equivalence in legal translation”analyzes and compares theequivalence between the source language and the target language of legal terminology,concludes three equivalences: near-equivalence, partial-equivalence andnon-equivalence. According to this theory, several common solutions to translatinglegal terminology can be chosen so as to compensate the cultural discrepancy.This thesis first introduces some concepts like“culture”,“legal culture”,“legaltranslation”,“legal terminology”, and“translation of legal terminology”, etc. and theirimplication. It then expounds briefly the influential causes, patterns and performancesof legal cultural discrepancy on the translation of legal terminology. What’s more, itenumerates three main theories about the study of legal terminology translation: therelevance-theory, the comparative law approach and the equivalence theory. Itintroduces in details the theoretical framework of equivalence and Sarcevic’s“equivalence in legal translation”and several relative solutions to translating legalterminology such as word-for-word (literal) translation, paraphrasing, lexicalexpansion, borrowing, neologism. etc. In the practice of translation, one or several solutions can be employed in one terminology, and the optimal translation can bechosen through comparison.