The Limits Of Translatability Of Legal Terms And The Compensation Strategies

With the development of globalization, the connection between China and theWestern countries has become much closer than before. Facing the complexinternational situations and intense commercial competitions, we must have a betterunderstanding of the laws of different countries so as to reduce the legal disputes.During this process, legal translation acts as a significant role. However, there aremany differences between the legal language and the general language in the daily life.The legal language is used in legislature, judicature and all the other legal fields. Itcontains many characteristics such as authoritiveness, accuracy, exclusiveness, etc.Therefore, the legal translation is apparently distinct from the general translation.Legal terms as a kind of jargon with legal features have drawn much attention recently.There are many studies on the translation of legal terms from different aspects. Thisthesis wants to conduct a study on the translation of legal terms from a specialperspective of the translation—limits of translatability.The discussion of the translatability and untranslatability has a long history athome and abroad. This thesis analyzes the previous studies and researches over thiscontroversy. Based on these analyses, the author concludes that the translatability isa relative concept and different languages can be translated in principle. However,sometimes the total equivalence of the source language and the target language ishardly reached. The translatability has certain limits. As a special register, thetranslation of the legal language also has to face the limits of translatability. As thecore of the legal translation, translation of legal terms can not avoid this problem.Sometimes it is difficult to find the equivalent expressions in the target legallanguage to stand for the concept in the original one. This is the reason why thelimits of translatability come into being.This thesis analyzes the linguistic factors and cultural factors which cause thelimits of translatability in the translation of legal terms. After analyzing the layers of lexical factors and semantic factors, the author believes that various linguisticfactors limit the translation of legal terms. In addition, since there are manydifferences in the social system, legal system, thinking patterns, etc, the culturalfactors also have an impact on the translatability of the legal terms. In order to solvethis problem, this thesis gives some compensation strategies with some typicalexamples. This study has certain theoretic meanings which may lead to the furtherstudy and make its due contribution to the translation of legal terms.