English Conjunctives And Their Chinese Translation In English Legal Literature

Conjunctive is one of the most significant means connecting sentences into a text in form.Although generality exists in the use of conjunctives in both English and Chinese textsbecause of the common ways of thinking among human beings, diversity is often revealedinsomuch as the different way of expression from English and Chinese. To sum up, moreexplicit conjunctions appear in English texts, while in Chinese more implicit conjunctions areused instead, because English emphasizes on the form and grammar of language, but Chineseon the sense and meaning.On the basis of the cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan and other relevant theories,the author, through contrasting the frequency of conjunctives appearing in legal literatures inEnglish to Chinese, suggests there are four significant situations in respect of conjunctives inthe process of the translation from English to Chinese, such as to render explicit conjunctivesinto implicit conjunctions, explicit conjunctives into explicit conjunctives, implicitconjunctions into implicit conjunctions and implicit conjunctions into explicit conjunctives, inwhich the former two situation is more common than the latter two. While ensuring that themeaning is properly and precisely transferred to the readers, the translator should “reproducein the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message” sothat the version will properly conform to the expression of Chinese.