Corpus-based Study On E-C And C-E Translation Of Conditionals In Legislative Texts

Of all the sentence patterns in legal provisions, conditionals are of the highestfrequency. Linguistic structure in itself is also an important component of meaning.Hence sentence structure is the key to legal provision translation. In fact, translation oflegal sentences in legal provisions is made possible due to the universality in deeplogical structural despite of cultural and linguistic differences. Deep structure ofconditionals being the same, the surface linguistic structure will present itself withsome form of regularity as a result of linguistic and legal cultural differences. Soconditional markers, clause order and intra-sentential relations as well as verb usage isalso a worthy subject.Based on a mini-corpus of eight company laws for English speaking countries andan English version of Company Law of PRC and A Parallel Corpus of China’s LegalDocuments (Hereinafter referred to as PCCLD), the thesis sets out to make adescriptive study on conditionals in legal provisions with the help of Wordsmith6.0,trying to seek the most relevant analytical framework and translation strategy with aview to reduce the arbitrariness and subjectivity in handling translation of conditionals.First of all, a descriptive study on surface structure traits between translated versionand the original produced by legislation drafters will be carried out based on thestatistic data collected. Secondly, the author probed into the deep linguistic structure ofconditionals with analysis of samples extracted from the corpus after the deep structuretheory. Adjustments in surface structures and deep structures such as the clause order,sentence pattern and intra-sequential relations of conditionals are to be identified andpresented. At last, the concepts of implicit and explicit conditionals are introduced.Implicitation and explicitation are used to handle the conditional translation to makethe translated versions more acceptable and readable in target language and legalculture on the premise of maintaining the same legal effect.