Features Of Legal Text And Translation Of Long Sentences In Legal Text: From The Perspective Of Text Typology

After China entered into the WTO, the economic and cultural connection between Chinaand other western countries has become much closer. Along with the increasing exchangewith the outside world, each year tremendous foreign laws and legal works are translated intoChinese. On the other hand, it is essential to translate numerous foreign legal writings intoChinese so that Chinese legal workers can learn from foreign advanced legal figuration fruits.For a long time, people cannot leave literal translation and free translation when discussingtranslation strategies. Actually, translation strategy is determined by the text type of the sourcelanguage. Therefore text types, as a patterned and specified language product that has beenused for a long time, should be classified. Each type of text can convey pragmatic intention ofa certain group of language user and realize the main function of specific text as well. As aresult, researches on text typology play an important role in the study of translation criteriaand the adoption of translation strategies.Apparently, the translation of the legal text differs from other kinds of texts because legaltext has its unique lexical and syntactical features. The enactment of legal documents hasfixed the pattern of the legal text, thus corresponding translation strategies for legal text hasbeen generated. This paper studies the classification of text type from the perspective of texttypology. Then, legal text and its functions and features are discussed. As a regulatory andinformative text, legal text embodies a number of long sentences with complex structureswhich leads the legal text hard to be comprehended. Therefore this paper also puts forwardsome methods of understanding legal sentences, especially the long sentences. Only bycomprehending long legal sentences precisely can the translating of legal texts be validwithout mistakes. Hence at the end of the paper, translation strategies of long sentences arestudied. In short, this research broaches the subject of translation of legal texts from theperspective of text typology, hoping to make some contributions to this field.