Research On Legal Translator’s Identities From The Perspective Of The National Translation Program

With the increasing importance of a nation’s legal voice, legal translation andits related studies have gained more attention from linguistic scholars than ever before.In the process, translators have gradually taken on a more active role in translationwith additional responsibilities and freedom, to the extent that they become in essencea co-drafter of legislation. The characteristic of legal texts being part of NationalTranslation Program even pushes legal translators to be a co-drafter. At present,bilingual or multilingual countries or regions such as Switzerland and Canada havemade co-drafting a reality and routine of legislation. Therefore, legal translators inthose places are real co-drafters. In China, legal transplantation makes Chinese lawsinternationalized, and thus provides Chinese legal translators the opportunity of beinga co-drafter. It is, as it were, a form of co-drafting at an early stage. However,such bilingual co-drafting cannot fully meet China’s need of sending out authenticChinese information to the world by translation. The government needs to havecontrol on the voice to the outer world of legal translation. In order to do that, wemight have the need to educate superior-proficiency level translators and eventuallyachieve an invisible co-drafting to some extent. Therefore, on one hand, we couldavoid some profound translation mistakes within our legal texts; on the other hand,our culture can maintain a positive image within the international culturalcommunication.The thesis has altogether five chapters, including an introduction, literaturereview of the studies, legal translator and the identity of co-drafter, legal translatorand National Translation Program, and, lastly, conclusion, limitation and questions open to further research. Chapter one and chapter two focus on the backgroundinformation and literature review of related studies. Chapter three describes commonchanges in the translator’s identity and status in both the western world and China,and then discusses the origin and development of the legal translator’s identity ofco-drafter and by the analogy of political voice, discusses the right way of legalvoice communication. Chapter four mainly proves the two features of legaltexts internationalized laws and texts translated under the National TranslationProgram. Due to the imbalance of law systems and legal terminology, the last sectionseparately points out three basic requirements for co-drafters through examples ofthree mistranslations. Chapter five is the conclusion, limitation and questions open tofurther research.