A Prototype Approach To The Translation Of "Fa"

In1975, Eleanor Rosch, a professor of psychology at the University of California,Berkeley, proposed the Prototype Theory (PT) in her psychological experiments. Henceforth,this theory is widely applied in cognitive psychology and translation practice. Under PT,translation is considered as a spatially and temporally specified activity to seek the bestexemplars of both the source language (SL) and the target language (TL). And the translatingprocess can be specified into three steps, the first is to recognize the prototype of SL, then tosearch for the corresponding TL reader’s prototype, and finally to reconstruct SL prototypewith TL prototype.In view of this, PT casts new light on legal translation. This paper adopts PT as thetheoretical framework, and takes the translation of “Fa” as a case study in order to investigateinto the prototype of “Fa” and the representation of its prototype effect in translation in thefollowing aspects. First, this paper constructs the prototype of “Fa” from the perspective ofetymology, semantic meaning and pragmatic meaning and finds that the construal of “Fa” canbe categorized into superordinate category, basic category and subordinate category. Second,this paper tentatively proposes a prototype approach to render “Fa” in order to highlight itsprototype effect through the following steps. a) To classify “Fa” into different categoriesbased on its attributes; b) To construct the corresponding expression of “Fa” in English inorder to search for TL reader’s prototype; and c) To understand and find correspondent TLprototype to reconstruct SL. Finally, this paper, concerning a deviation existing betweenactual prototype and ideal prototype in translation, applies some strategies, i.e. cognitivedomain transfer, category consistency, cultural compensation and descriptive paraphrase toreduce such deviations.In brief, PT, as a cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics study, provides aneffective and practical way to legal translation in that it helps to construct and integrateprototypical information in the process of translation. This paper aims at providing a new wayto understand the legal text and literature from a cognitive point of view, hoping that it willmake some contributions to the future study of legal translation.