A Comparative Study Of Chinese Definitions In Law And Their English Translations Based On Discourse Information Analysis

Definitions in law are an indispensable part of law. They determine theconnotation and denotation of legal terminologies and can avoid ambiguity of legalprovisions. More importantly, the definition in law mostly restricts the scope ofapplication of the law and therefore plays a crucial role in the whole law. For theconvenience of communication and connection with foreign language speakers inChina or abroad, it is of great importance to research the English translation ofChinese definitions in laws of different types and in different forms. But up to nowthere is no academic paper on English translation of Chinese definitions in law.Thereupon it’s urgent to make such an attempt. The research objectives of this paperare: first, to discover the differences in terms of discourse information betweenChinese definitions in law and their parallel English translations; second, to give legal,cultural and linguistic explanations to such differences; third, to sum up implicationsfor future translation of Chinese definitions according to the findings. This thesis willdescribe these differences with the tree model of discourse information analysis whichin this paper is composed of discourse structure and information element. Theanalysis of discourse structure will be conducted from the perspectives of horizontalstructure and vertical structure while the analysis of information element will beconducted from its number, content, value and type. Then explanations of thedifferences between Chinese definitions and their English translations will be given indifferent chapters of analysis. Last, based on what we have found, we will put forwardsome implications for translating definitions in law. That is, the translation processshall consist of two steps: identification and translation. Before translation, the typesof definitions, including standard and non-stand definition, and of predicates in thedefinition, including standard definition with major predicate and standard definitionwith subsidiary predicate, shall be identified first of all. Then different strategies willbe proposed in the translation of different types of definitions.