Cultural Vacancies Between Legal English And Legal Chinese And Their Translation Strategies From The Perspective Of Cultural Schema

Cultural vacancy is caused by cultural peculiarity. Therefore, how to dealwith cultural vacancy is a challenging activity for translators, especially in legaltranslation. Due to the special features of legal language and great differencebetween different legal systems, it is more difficult to represent the legal cultureand function of law in the target language. Many related researches on culturalvacancy have been made, while few studies have been made in legal translationabout this issue. This thesis attempts to explore how to deal with culturalvacancy in legal translation from the perspective of cultural schema.Cultural schema is abstract structure of cultural knowledge in people’smind. Hence, cultural vacancy is also treated as the absence of correspondingcultural knowledge. It can be concluded that the absence of correspondingcultural schema in the target readers’ mind causes cultural vacancy. Thus, if thecultural schema in the source language can be transformed to the target language,the cultural vacancy can be filled up. Research shows that cultural schema istranslatable due to the similar reactive competence, the same thinkingcompetence, and the modifiability cultural schema.Whether the cultural vacancy is successfully translated is decided by thedegree of the faithful transformation of the specific cultural schema. This thesisproposes five kinds of translation methods based on cultural schema, which aretransliteration or transliteration with notes, transference, literal translation orliteral translation with notes, free translation and creating new words.