The Explicitation Of Cohesion In Chinese-English Translation Of Legal Texts

With the deepening of globalization, legal translation, as an important medium for inter-national exchanges of laws, has attracted more and more attention around the world and become one important aspects of LSP(Language for Special Purpose). At present, there are a large number of legal versions in China, but they are uneven in qualities. Therefore, the studies on legal translation theory and practice will further boost the promotion of legal translation in China, and facilitate legal cultural exchanges with the western countries.Rigorousness and precision, two most important features of legal translation, require the translator to maximize the information from source text to target text so as to avoid ambiguity. Cohesion is an important factor in achieving a coherent text and the accuracy of its translation directly impacts on the quality of translation. However, there exist a host of differences in employing cohesive devices between English and Chinese. How to deal with these differences and meet the requirements of legal translation’s precision and rigorousness are thorny issues that translators should take into consideration in the translation process.Explicitation, one of the most popular areas in translation universals theory, has attracted increasing attention from domestic and foreign scholars in translation field. Explicitation refers to the process where translators will, intentional or unintentional, make the implicit information in the source text manifest in the target text to make the translation more natural, and readable. Explicitation is adopted in order to avoid syntactic and semantic errors caused by linguistic differences, and to avoid misunderstandings caused by cultural differences.This thesis attempts to account and analyze the cohesive devices used in Labor Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China and Contract Law of People’s Republic of China published by two authoritative legal publishing houses. It aims at understanding the added features of these cohesive devices and looks forward to prove the hypothesis of explicitation of cohesion in Chinese-English translation of legal texts.