Translation Of Legal Terminology From The Perspective Of German Functionalist Translation Theory

Nowadays, globalization is developing continuously, Reform and Open up ismoving deeply and international communication becomes more and more frequent. Infact, legal translation is closely related to international communication. Against such abackground, legal text translation becomes a very important subject for translators.During the whole translation process, no matter what kind of legal text is translated,this activity is a certain issue standing at the crossroads of translation strategies. Legalterminologies are the key stones for legal texts. At present, many scholars focus onthis research from different viewpoints and come up with a lot of guiding and shiningtranslation strategies and principles. Meanwhile, the micro—equivalence is put thekey position during this trend, such as, lexical expressions and syntactic structures,but the text functions and the translation purposes are ignored.The functionalist translation theory departs from traditional linguistic translationtheories and puts forward a new method which is helpful to analyze legalterminologies and their translation from a higher viewpoint. Under this theory,translation is an action with an explicit function and translation strategies should takethe function or the purpose of the target text into consideration. The criterion toevaluate the translation version is whether the function or aim is realized or not.Translating legal terminology also aims at achieving certain purposes and under suchguidance, translators are encouraged to take advantage of any effective strategy toachieve the expected purpose.This thesis’s theoretical basis is German Functionalist Translation Theory andthis thesis illustrates the application of Skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity ruleinto the legal terminology translation. Under the guidance of each respective rule,such concrete translation strategies are put forward as transliteration, flexibletranslation (notes included), addition of appropriate archaic words, conversion of partsof speech, selection of big and formal words, paraphrase, neologism, free translation, literal rendering.