Culture-loaded Words In Traditional Legal Chinese: Its Interpretation And English Translation

With the inspiration from the “cultural turn” of translation studies in Western countries,legal translation is being considered as a cross-cultural communicative activity and legalculture involved in legal translation is being highlighted. However, few researchers haveprobed into the culture-loaded words in traditional legal Chinese that reflect legal cultureintensively.In order to introduce the extensive and profound traditional legal culture of China, it is ofutmost importance to translate culture-loaded legal words accurately. Due to the legal culturaldiscrepancy between Western countries and China, the translation of culture-loaded legalwords is bristled with difficulties. Therefore, the translator firstly has to be familiar withrelevant cultural background and secondly choose appropriate translation strategies, so as toconvey the meaning of the culture-loaded word to the target readers. The T’ang Code, as anexcellent representative of ancient laws in China, is the breeding ground of large number ofculture-loaded legal words. The research of this thesis is based on culture-loaded legal wordsin The T’ang Code.Firstly, the thesis explores factors influencing traditional legal culture of China andillustrates how these factors being reflected in culture-loaded legal words, with emphasis onthe following factors, the thought of Confucianism, the autocracy of imperial powers, the ideaof collectivism and the hierarchical system. Secondly, the thesis concludes three majorproblems that would possibly occur in the translation of culture-loaded legal words, which areover translation, under translation, and mistranslation. Thirdly, with the purpose of decreasingthe aforesaid problems, the thesis brings out translation norms to guide the process oftranslation. Besides accuracy, clarity and consistency, known as translation norms in legaltranslation, the thesis attempts to discuss the norm of equivalence, including both equivalenceof language and equivalence of legal effect. Lastly, the thesis comes up with several specifictranslation methods in translating culture-loaded legal words, covering amplification,annotation, transliteration, transliteration with annotation, literal translation with annotation, paraphrase and so on.