Nominalization In The English Translation Of Legislative Texts

With the reform and opening up to the outside world since the1970s, the economy ofChina has developed rapidly. In the trading and exchanging process with other countries, theunderstanding of laws between China and other countries becomes extremely urgent.Nowadays, more and more foreign laws are introduced into China, and Chinese laws are alsosteadily flowing into foreign countries. The both-way transmission of laws promotes theprosperity of legal translation and researches on it. Over the past several decades, a lot ofresearches have been done on the translation of legal documents. Scholars have made greatprogress in this field, but researches on the application of nominalization in the translationprocess of Chinese legislative texts are few even though nominalization is a typical linguisticfeature of English. Likewise, although a great amount of researches have been done onnominalization at home and abroad, few of them are about its application in Chineselegislative texts.Therefore, the present thesis will blaze a new trail on this area to conduct a deep study onthe application of nominalization in the translation process of Chinese legislative texts. Basedon a qualitative research on the Chinese and English version of the Criminal Law of the PRC,the author aims to raise some enlightenment of nominal structures for the translation ofChinese legislative texts. In the light of the previous studies on nominalization, legislative texttranslation and the application of nominalization in translation at home and abroad, this thesisdescribes nominalization in legal English, consisting of the frequent use of nominalization inlegal English and the functions of nominalization in legal English. A comparative study aboutthe linguistic features of Chinese and English in respect of nominalization is carried out tofind out the underlying causes of nominalization phenomenon in English. At last, according toNida’s “dynamic equivalence” theory and the “analysis-transfer-restructure” translation model,the thesis concludes some enlightenment of nominalization in the English translation ofChinese legislative texts: the conversion of the parts of speech, adjusting the sentencestructure, condensing information and the translation of “…...的” structure in legal Chinese. The thesis aims to explore nominalization translation strategies in the translation processof Chinese legislative texts, in the hope of shedding some lights on legal translation practice.