On The Readability Of Chinese Legal Texts

Law, as a powerful motive force that urges social justice, possesses considerablesignificance in social life. In order to better realize law’s value, the legal language should beunderstood by vast majority of ordinary people. In daily life, however, we are oftenconfronted with some sophisticated legal texts whose language cannot be efficiently andproperly comprehended. How to solve this problem is one of the important research topics inthe field of forensic linguistic."Readability" is just the crucial link between thecomprehension difficulty of a text and the reading ability of its readers. The so-calledreadability refers to the "the ease in which a text can be read and understood". A proper andqualified legal text should be equipped with high readability level.This thesis takes an approach combining theoretical analysis and empirical analysis. Inthe help of questionnaire, the author of this thesis investigated237subjects and got somebasic information about people’s awareness and attitude towards the readability of Chineselegal texts. Based on the previous readability theories, investigation findings, and inherentcharacteristics of legal Chinese, the thesis focuses on four aspects to analyze the deep reasonsfor low readability of Chinese legal texts: word level, sentence level, paragraph level andanomies in legal texts. By employing semantic, syntactic and some other linguistic theories,the thesis finally summarizes the most possible language factors which may exercise maligninfluence on Chinese legal texts. These factors includes legal words, professional contents,sentence length, sentence structure, paragraph structure, the amount of information in a singlesentence or paragraph, anomies in legal texts and so on.The progress of Chinese legal language cannot be truly realized without theimprovement of its readability. In the light of the analysis, the thesis puts forward someproposals on how to reduce the comprehension difficulty of Chinese legal texts. The authorfinds that using more "core words"; more proper annotations and cohesion devices; moresimple sentences and paragraphs; more informative headings before complicated paragraphsare all very useful and practical for improving the readability of Chinese legal texts. Implications were discussed for the readability of legal language and recommendationswere made for future research...