On Internal Translation Work Mode Applied In Law Firms-From The Perspective Of Functionalism

With the integration of global businesses, legal activities conducted by internationallaw firms are of great importance. For parties operating in different working languages, legaltranslation, serving as the communicator between parties, is playing a critical role.However, legal translation in law firm remains unsystematic and inefficient to someextent due to imperfect assessment of translators’ qualification and translation quality, aswell as intensifying workload. On the other hand, most translation studies on legaltranslation have focused either on legislative text or on specific translation strategies relatingto contracts. Meanwhile, most aforesaid studies are based on functionalism, which,compared with traditional translation studies, focuses more on the macro level, including thewhole translation process and work mode.Therefore, this thesis, based on functionalism, studies the work mode applied in legaltranslation in law firms, i.e. the way that the participants interact and communicate intranslation process with the help of current available resources to ensure the success andefficiency of translation tasks.This thesis briefs the status quo of work mode in legal translation in law firms andintroduces the core concepts of functionalism in the first place; then focuses on theapplication of functionalism in legal translation in law firms, which concludes that1) thefrozen feature of legal language makes it possible for all participants working on acooperative base;2) the function-oriented feature of legal texts in law firms indicates theSkopos theory is applicable in monitoring the whole working process; and3) the possibilityof direct or indirect interaction and communication between all participants shall be anadvantage made full use of in the whole translation process. Based on the theoreticalframework and descriptive analysis, the thesis lists a case of translation of an acquisitiondeal, aiming to inspect the efficiency of the work mode from the perspective offunctionalism and advise on the optimization of such work mode.As a conclusion, legal translation activities in law firms shall be conducted under theguidance of Skopos theory, with full use of the advantages of availability of interaction andcommunication and with an effort to timely collect and arrange resources for future use.