A Corpus Analysis Of The English Translation Of The "de"Construction In Chinese Legal Texts

China entered Word Trade Organization and has been integrated into the world economy. It’s necessary to translate our national law into English and help more foreigners comprehend Chinese law with the purpose of protecting our country’s benefits in international business. The "de" construction frequently appears in Chinese legal text. The legal translators unavoidably deal with the English translation of the construction in china. This paper carefully discusses the English translation of the "de" construction in Chinese legal texts and intends to find the underlying principles and reasons behind different translations and summarizes the techniques for the English translation of the "de" construction in Chinese legal text.This paper uses the civil and business law in1990s as materials, chooses36Chinese and corresponding English legal texts by randomly sampling, processes and tags them and establish a parallel corpus of105,950characters/words. This paper employs translation equivalence as theory support to carefully discuss the English translation of the "de" construction in Chinese legal texts. The result shows the English translation of the "de" construction is not consistent. And the "de" construction can be translated as conditional adverbial clauses, attributive clauses, temporal adverbial clauses, subject clauses, non-finite verbs and prepositional phrases. The above6translation versions can exactly express the meaning of the "de" construction, which reflects the semantic equivalence. But style equivalence and culture equivalence are also taken into consideration. The best translation is chosen on the base of semantic equivalence and with the maxim equivalence as the judging criteria.After analyzing lots of data and examples, two points are summarized to provide techniques for legal translators. Translators should add the omitted subject according to the concrete contexts and English sentence structure when translating the "de" construction in Chinese legal texts. Moreover, most of the "de" constructions should be translated as passive sentences, if possible. The reason lies in the fact that passive sentence frequently appears in formal texts in English.This paper obtains many authentic and objective data and examples by establishing a corpus and combines qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis to study the English translation of the "de" construction in Chinese legal texts. A corpus analysis of the "de" construction has not been found in literature search. The research will help the legal translators improve the level and efficiency of translation in legal translation practice, and, to some degree, contribute to the development of legal translation theory.