| This study is doing research on “V+N” collocation in legal translation by usingcorpus and the research methods adopted here are a combination of qualitative analysisand quantitative analysis. While the aim of the thesis is to find out the characteristics ofthe usage of “V+N” collocation in legal English and to contrast the differences of theusage of “V+N” structure between translated legal texts and the original legal Englishtexts. The thesis intends to offer a better choice in words selectionwhen translating legaltexts.In general, verb and noun are considered to be the core components in a sentencefor they can easily collocate with other words and form many different collocations.Studies on this subject are mainly from three aspects: stylistic, grammatical andsemantic.This thesis focuses on the aspect of semantic study and is to find out ways toimprove the accuracy of legal translation by selecting “V+N” collocations properly.Legal translation is unique in that the translation methodis fixed to some extent and it ispossible to find it out by analyzing the data collected from corpus.Two questions are to be solved in this thesis:1) What is the feature of the “V+N”structure in legal English?2) What are the differences between translated legal Englishtexts and original English legal texts in the selection of “V+N” structure?This research is based on one corpus and two databases: COCA, Lexis Nexis andPKU Law. The research procedure is divided into three steps: data collecting, datacontrasting and analyzing of the results. Firstly, input translated English legal textsextracted from PKU Law to Antconc and get the high frequency used verbs. Thensearch these verbs in PKU Law and Lexis Nexis and analyze200groups of collocationsselected at random. Finally, contrast the statistics with COCA’s and analyze the databothsynchronically and diachronically. By doing so the thesis is to find out thecharacteristics of “V+N” structure in legal English.Findings are:1)“V+N” structure in legal language isfixed with frequent use ofpassive voice. Legal language is stricter in words selection by being logical andprofessional.2) The words in translated English texts that collocate with the node wordare limitedas compared with the original ones by contrasting the usage of “V+N”collocation, and the affection of the node word on the collocations is not so great, whichshows that the second language learners have a certain degree of limitations when translating legal texts and they rely more on native language. |
PDF Full Text Request