Nominalization In The English Translation Of Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Law:a Corpus-based Study

The progression of constructing country and society governed with rule of law and the wide corporation with other countries in every field put forward new demands and challenges for our country’s scientific legislation, law enforcement, judicature and legal translation, which also raise the importance of legal language research and translation. Nominalization is a typical phenomenon in legal English, which has been proved by scholars both at home and abroad. Therefore, analysis of nominalization is significant for the systemic study of legal language and the accurate translation of legal texts.Based on44Chinese and English texts of Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Law (TEPL) selected randomly, a small corpus (CTEPL) is constructed as the research subject of this dissertation. With the help of ParaConc software and the combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods, this dissertation systematically analyzes the phenomenon of nominalization in the English translation of TEPL (ETTEPL). As a research tool, the corpus, based on large amounts of authentic language materials (the corpus includes15.4186words/characters), provides scientific statistics for the research of nominalization in ETTEPL, which makes the results more accurate and reliable.After research, the author finds out that:(1) Nominalization is a common phenomenon in ETTEPL;(2) Nominalization in ETTEPL mainly involves verbs such as and and phrase such as "subject+verb "/"verb+object" which are all legal acts of environmental protection, and prepositions such as "of","with" and "to" and article "the" have played important roles in the process of nominalization.(3) Nominalization in ETTEPL makes the languages more formal, objective, strict and cohesive. The author holds the views that:(1) Nominalization can be applied flexibly as a translation technique in the English translation of TEPL and other legal texts;(2) Nominalization in ETTEPL also has disadvantages. It leads to obscurity and complexity, which may be difficult for non-experts or new learners to read or study. Nominalization may also cause vagueness in the demonstration of agents in legal acts, which can result in misunderstanding in legal language or disputes in legal life. Therefore, over-nominalization should be avoided in the process of English translation of legal texts.The research of nominalization is not only important for the thorough comprehension of legal languages, but also can provide a new approach to the accurate translation of legal texts. Meanwhile, the analysis of laws and regulations of Taiwan district is also significant for the communication, corporation and unification of our country, which meets the common desire of all Chinese.