Corpus-based Error Analysis Of The English Version Of The Criminal Procedure Act Of The People’s Republic Of China (1996)

Although the English translations of Chinese laws and regulations have increasedquickly, the quality of English translations of Chinese laws and regulations is far frombeing satisfactory. Such low-quality translations will not only seriously affect China’sinternational image, but also bring about great many problems in legal practice.Based on Carl James’s error taxonomy and a summary of legal translation criteriaproposed by different scholars at home and abroad, this thesis was designed to detect,categorize, describe and analyze errors made in the Criminal Procedure Act of thePeople’s Republic of China (1996). A systematic research of error distribution and errorcauses was conducted. More importantly, the author of the thesis has exerted greatefforts to propose some methods and strategies for the purpose of error correction andimprovement of the English translation quality.The English version of the Criminal Procedure Act of the People’s Republic ofChina (1996) was established as a translation corpus. On the basis of Carl James’ errortaxonomy, the error categories and error causes are qualitatively analyzed. Thecategorized errors are computed with Micro office Excel2007, and frequencies andpercentages of errors at substance, text and discourse level are also calculated with theaid of Excel2007, and findings of the study are listed in the following:(1) A total of734errors are detected in the translation corpus, among which texterrors (515,70.26%) rank in the first place, followed by substance errors (206,29.77%).There are only13discourse errors in the corpus,1.77%of the total.(2) As for text errors, lexical errors (493,95.73%) heavily outnumber grammarerrors (22,4.27%). Lexical errors mainly consist of semantic errors (337,68.29%) andverbosity (156,31.71%). The number of the former is almost twice as much as that ofthe later. Most substance errors identified in this study belong to punctuation errors(199,99.03%).(3) Most detected errors are caused by intralingual reasons (498，67.85%),followed by induced errors (157，21.39%) and interlingual errors (72，9.81%). The leastfrequent cause of errors is carelessness, only accounting for0.95%. The following conclusions can be drawn from the study:(1) In the English version of the Criminal Procedure Act of the People’s Republicof China (1996), identified errors include errors in spelling, punctuation, collocation,morphology, syntax and discourse, covering all the three levels mentioned by CarlJames: substance, text and discourse. They are mainly caused by translators’deficiencies in the target language competence. Therefore, more emphasis should be putupon cultivation of learners’ language competence during legal English teaching andstudy.(2) Lexis and grammar are two major factors in legal translation. More attentionshould be paid to lexical semantic relations and collocation, as well as syntactic rules.(3) Despite the fact that intralingal errors are not the predominant error causes inlegal translation, still, translators are inevitably influenced by Chinese thinking patternsand language codes, leading to negative transfer of Chinese.(4) In the English translation of the Criminal Procedure Act of the People’sRepublic of China, some errors are caused by the unique stylistic features of legalEnglish, such as verbosity, misuse of model verbs. Thus, in order to ensure that thetranslation is faithful and original, great importance has to be attached to stylisticfeatures of legal English.Qualitative and quantitative studies of errors in the English translation of Chinesestatutes are made on the basis of error analysis methodology in combination withstylistic features of legal English. In the thesis, causes of errors in legal translation weredisclosed. Consequently, a number of strategies were proposed for the improvement ofC-E legal translation. The analysis and strategies suggested in the thesis can be usedwhen translating the newly amended the Criminal Procedure Act of the People’sRepublic of China to avoid potential errors and improve translation quality.Furthermore, the study will shed light on legal English teaching and learning.