Study On The Syntactic Structures And Strategies For Syntactic Linearity In English-Chinese Legal Interpretation

The acceleration of economic globalization has speed up exchanges among cultures and economies, which, undoubtedly, lead to more disputes and disagreement between parties speaking various languages. Language barriers and barriers erected by cultural misunderstanding can render defendants virtually absent from their own court proceedings as well as result in misinterpretation of witness statement. As a result, legal interpreter plays an important role in judicial process from the linguistic perspective.English and Chinese derive from different language families, and the differences of syntactic structures are inevitable. Yet, it is not hard to find out that English and Chinese share similarities in terms of syntactic structure in certain circumstances which make syntactic linearity possible. English is subject-prominent and in most cases, the subject and the theme are the same, while Chinese is topic-prominent and topics are themes basically, as a result, it is relevant to compare syntactic structures of English and Chinese for interpreting practices.With the aim to study on the influence of structures on linear interpretation, the report, through analyzing syntactic structures in legal interpretation to unveil structural varieties, and on the basis of the principle of syntactic linearity, the author may explore the way of applying linear interpretation in legal cases to assist both practitioners and students in their performance. The report gives an introduction to research background, pointing out the importance and significance of such research and briefing on the theoretical basis of study at the beginning. Then, on the basis of model legal interpretations, the author makes an analysis and discussion on the feasibility of utilizing syntactic linearity in legal case on the basis of thematic progression, as well as strategies for the application of linear interpreting in legal cases. At last, there will be a conclusion of the thesis, including discussing some limitations of such study, and suggestions for future study on legal interpretation.