Syntactic Features Of The Chinese Legislative Text And Its English Translation

Language is the carrier of law. Language in the legal context primarily coverslegislative language, language in the judiciary process, and language in the process oflaw enforcement. Legislative language, which forms the central part of legal language,conducts and standardizes any other languages in the legal field. David Mellinkoffpresents that "law is a profession of words", for it is by means of language thatlegislation prescribes rights, obligations and so on to regulate various relations in thesociety. Legislative sentences are the basic forms that manifest legislative language.Authorizations, permissions, obligations and prohibitions constitute the main structure oflegislative language. However, the hypotaxis of English and parataxis of Chinese to agreat extent exist at the syntactic level. Therefore, the syntactic barrier is to be overcomein the process of legal translation. Furthermore, the precision and professionalism oflegislative language is embodied by the strict logical structure of legislative sentences,which includes legal subject, legal action, case and condition. It is equally vital to reflectthe logic of law in its version at the syntactic level.This study is carried out in view of the above reasons. In the study, a normativelegal text, the General Civil Law of the People’s Republic of China is selected as thelinguistic data. Firstly, the study investigates the leading features of legislative sentencesin the text from three aspects such as sentence types, sentence patterns and sentencestructures. Then the study attempts to elaborate these features combining linguistictheory with legal theory. According to the study, legislative sentences have stylized andprofessional expressions. To reveal the authoritative, solemn and mandatory styles oflegislation, only declarative sentences and imperative sentences are used in the text.Declarative sentences primarily states what right people have or which act is permitted,while imperative sentences are employed to prescribe which act ought to be performed orwhich act is forbidden. Occasionally, an imperative sentence contains a subject thatprecisely identifies legal subject. Besides, there have been distinctive sentence patterns that are used to explicitly indicate rights, obligations, permissions and prohibitions.Moreover, the unique "de"(的) structure is essential to the rigorous logic of Chineselegislative sentences. Secondly, as the special principles for legal translation, precisionand professionalism are discussed. Finally, according to the differences between Englishand Chinese, practical and concrete strategies including the rearrangement of syntacticstructures, the conversion of the "de"(的) structure and the use of English modal verbs,are presented and illustrated through comparisons between the existing authoritativeversions.The dimensional combination of linguistics, jurisprudence and translation is agrowing trend in the study of legal translation. The present study has analyzed legislativesentences from both linguistic perspective and jurisprudential perspective, and alsoprovided translators with practical strategies. The study is expected to be useful topromote practical legal transition as well as the future study.