General Rules Of Syntactic Pattern Conversion In Legal English Translation

As the world economy globalizes, the most important thing for Chinese lawyers working in such a complicated international commercial environment is that they not only know the laws, but also have a good command of a foreign language. Legal translation is a process of linguistic analysis and synthesis in the context composed by elements such as law, language and philosophy. In other words, instead of one legal text, a translator needs to understand and study the two texts of both languages because what he touches is the "net" of law which is one or more legal systems, and the translation need to be consistent with the whole legal system. The translation skills can be conveyed through the coordination and combination of the language and the translation is restricted by legal culture in the working language. Thus the transformation and conversion of legal language are not only based on language structure, the surface of legal text, but also based on the legal principle.In this paper, the author explores the legal content including the legal principle and the legal language so as to understand and translate legal sentences correctly. First of all, the author explains from the aspect of legal principle including the legal logic, the hermeneutical circle and the legal power implication and studies the way to correctly understand and interpret the true intendment of law implicated in the legal language. Secondly, from the perspective of the operation of legal language, the most difficult part is the long sentences. The "long sentences" here doesn’t simply mean sentences with a good length, but refers to sentences with intricate syntactic structure, lots of subordinate clauses and modifiers and more than one level of content. In light of the purpose, the nature and the literary feature of legal documents, there are more such "long sentences" in legal documents than any other literary works, which causes extra burden in legal translation. So to speak, the right understanding and translation of long sentences is the key to the success of legal translation.In this thesis, the author explores the syntactic integration of long sentences on the basis of the Legal Integration Model proposed by Fauconnier and Mandelblit, breaks the structure of long English sentences and converts the "non-equivalence" of the expressions in two languages resulting from the differences of sentence pattern and language integration in stating the same event. In order to make the translation more standardized and perfect, the author also studies the common conversion method for legal sentences. To put it more specifically, when translating long sentences, the first thing is to correctly understand the logic relationship among all relative components; secondly, segment the sentence properly, figure out the main stem and translate the sentence accordingly; thirdly, change the order of the sentence and recombine the sentence according to the idiomatic Chinese expressions. Only in this way can the expression be coherent, accurate and clear. The segmentation and integration of English sentences must be done on the premise that the translator has correctly understood the overall meaning of the sentence. The translator needs to closely stick to the original meaning rather than rigidly adhere to the original sentence structure, properly links the contents according to the time sequence and logic relationship and finally achieves a faithful and fluent translation.Hopefully this thesis can be helpful in legal translation practices.