On The Stylistic Features Of The Translated Legislative Texts From The Perspective Of Functional Stylistics

Thanks to the continuous social development, with China’s accession to the WTO inparticular, China, as a market with biggest potential, has attracted increasing foreigninvestments and cooperation. In this process, the introduction of Chinese laws and regulationsto the outside world is of vital importance in regulating the market and maintaining order.Thus study of the translation of the domestic laws and regulations has become increasinglycrucial.“The Trademark Law of the PRC “, a law that regulates the registration, use and othermatters of trademarkc--the sign and soul of an enterprise,--plays a decisive role in today’sbusiness activities. The dispute concerning the trademark of “iPad” between Apple andShenzhen Proview is the best proof. Domestic and foreign scholars, however, pay little heedto the study of translation of laws and regulations in view of stylistics, let alone thetranslations of the Trademark Law.Functional stylistics is an increasingly important branch of stylistics which provides uswith an effective tool to analyze the stylistic features of literary language. This paper holdsthat functional stylistics is equally applicable to the analysis of legal texts, especially theanalysis of the legislative text. Based on the framework of functional stylistics, this thesis,combining quantitative with qualitative analysis, conducts analysis on the two translations of“the Trademark Law” to assess the realizations of ideational, interpersonal and textualfunctions. Through the analysis, this paper figures out the stylistic features of the twotranslated legislative texts at all levels, the similarities and differences of the two differenttranslations and the reason for such differences:Analysis of ideational function is mainly focused on transitivity and vocabulary. Thisresearch finds that both translations adopt lots of material process, relational process,technical terms and common words with uncommon meanings to maintain the profession,consistency, accuracy and preciseness of the ideational meaning. Analysis of ideationalfunction focuses on mood, modality and vocabulary. Plenty of “shall” and “may” andnegative forms thereof as well as formal words are used to express compulsion and obligation,aiming to guaranteeing the formalness and authoritativeness of legislative texts. Textualfunction is mainly realized by grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. V1and V2use alarge amount of personal reference, additive, adversative, temporal and casual-conditionalconjunction and lexical reiteration, and few substitutions to realize coherence of legislative texts and achieve certainty, explicitness and consistency. Although both translations share thesame ideational and textual functions, yet there exist slight differences in interpersonalfunction due to the distinctions of translators and intended readers.This paper provides inspirations and guidance for the future translation of legislativetexts and enriches studies in the field of legislative text translation.