Relevance Theory And Its Application To Legal Terminology Translation

The legal terminology makes up an important component of the legal language, and itstranslation has long been deemed as one of the difficult jobs by those legal translationscholars. The fact that the lack of equivalence exists between the source language and thetarget language makes the terminology translation draw much more attention from thescholars at home and abroad.But many of the studies are confined to the realm of contrastive linguistics. Few havetried to explore the mental process of a legal translator in the legal terminology translationfrom the theoretical framework of the Relevance Theory. Legal terminology translationshould not only be considered as a mere process of trans-coding or an act of communication.Rather, it is an ostensive-inferential process. There are many factors that play critical roles inthe process of translation. According to Sperber&Wilson’s Relevance Theory, this papermakes studies on the legal terminology translation and aims to investigate the factorsinfluencing the legal terms translation between different cultures. It purports to identify themain factors that influence the translators’ choice of words in the translation process toaccount for the inconsistency in legal terms translation.According to the Relevance Theory, every aspect of communication and cognition isgoverned by the search for relevance. They think that language communication is a kind ofpurposeful, intentional activity. In the process of communication, the speaker must guide thehearer’s recognition for their own purposes. And the translation of legal terms is anostensive-inferential dynamic process, during which the translator strive for the optimalrelevance. The thesis tries to survey the implication the Relevance Theory has on thetranslation of legal terminology. To achieve the optimal relevance, translators of legalterminology can directly use the corresponding terms or near equivalent terms or they can usethe indirect translation method according to the circumstances. The thesis also attempts tofind the factors influencing the quality of translation through the help of the Relevance Theory: the legal concept, the language difference and the context.The present thesis aims to account for the translators’ mental process in the translating oflegal terminology from the perspective of the Relevance Theory. It gets the conclusion that inthe translation of legal terminology, the Relevance Theory can be applied by the translator inorder to produce the translation of good quality that can incur the same effect on both thesource language readers and the target language readers and necessarily induce the leastprocessing effort on the part of the target readers.The present study may help better evaluate the different versions of the legal terminologytranslation with the Relevance Theory. And the influencing factors concluded may also helpthe training for the translators.