Faithfulness In Legislative Translation:a Contrastive Study Of Two English Translations Of The Criminal Law Of The PRC

The translation of legislation which is endowed with unique legal effects deviatesfrom that of judicial papers and law enforcement documents. Legislative translation,in a sense, is similar to legal drafting. Though the translations in the mainland Chinais not accepted as effective texts, translators might still adhere to higher standards oftreating their translations as documents with potential effectiveness and take bothlinguistic and legal issues into consideration in an effort to ensure the faithfulness ofthe renderings.Translations of legislation need to be made faithful to the original texts. Thefaithfulness, however, is actually required to be shown to the legal rules expressed bylegal language. As for the translation of the criminal code, to stay faithful is mainly togive a clear account of the textual structure, ingredients of crimes and correspondingsentences provided by the original text.Though with no official legal force, the translations will still affect the choices ofnon-Chinese speakers whoever use them as a reference. Thus it is quite necessary toask whether the renderings faithfully represent the legal rules expressed by theoriginal statute. To justify the study, the present thesis selects two English translationversions from two English databases of laws and regulations with relatively greaterpopularity, i.e. NPC Database of Law and Regulations and China LawInfo Database,attempts to study the place where they diverge from each other, mainly theirtranslations of important polysemous and synonymous terms and the textual structure,and analyzes the legal issues involved in each case so as to examine whether thetranslations stay faithful to law.It has been found in this study that both translations choose words quiterandomly in many cases and fail to differentiate the multiple meanings of thepolysemous terms examined. And due to violation of the basic Principle of same meaning, same word, same form, the translations fail to distinguish differentmeanings of the synonyms reviewed. In relation to the textual structure, the NPCversion alters the logical relation of different chapters of the statute. Also, it is worthnothing that the linguistic loopholes in the original text may account for somemisinterpretations in the two translation versions.