A Review Of Researches Into The Translation Of Legislative Texts

Given its importance in China’s legal construction and international exchanges oflaws and regulations, the translation of legislative texts has drawn significant attentionfrom scholars, and a large number of studies on it have been conducted. This thesispresents a review of these studies on the translation of legislative texts from threeperspectives: research perspectives, research methods and research contents. It mayhopefully shed some light on future researches into the translation of legislative texts.Such researches have attempted to approach the translation of legislative textsbasically from two perspectives: translation theories and interdisciplinary ones, andspecial regard is given to the most favored translation theories, including functionalschool, Eugene A. Nida’s functional equivalence, and static equivalence proposed bydomestic scholar Li Kexing. Among the interdisciplinary studies, pragmatics andlinguistics are frequently discussed approaches. However, the problem is that mostpapers are more of an attempt to prove the applicabilities of theories than in-depthanalyses of the research objects.These researches, in terms of research methods, can be categorized into threetypes: qualitative and quantitative methods, descriptive method, and comparativeanalysis method. Other methods like self-constructing corpus have also been preferredas an important approach among scholars. As those corpuses are usually small,however, corpus-based studies are comparatively narrow and superficial, and thereforeare criticized for being not representative enough.Research contents by far mainly cover five areas: linguistic features, translationprinciples and strategies, translation theories, quality assessment and comments, aswell as comparative analysis of texts. A notable feature of these researches is that onlyfew of them focus on a specific aspect while most involve more than one aspect oflegislative texts. Since researches based on examples from the researchers’ ownpractice mainly rely on empirical knowledge, its reliability may invite somedisagreements.