"Normality" In Legal Translation

In recent years, the international status of China has been gradually elevating,and international communication has been becoming increasingly frequent in China.It is the development of researches on legal language in depth, especial for that on thetranslation of the law of civil that creates favorable conditions for the researches oflinguistic comparison and E-C legal translation on the General Civil Law of the PRC(hereinafter refers to as “the GCL of the PRC”). A large number of scholars orrelevant students engaging in E-C legal language have tried to be in search of moreeffective approaches so as to solve the existent issues of legal translation. In thisthesis, the author has intended to apply Gideon Toury’s theory of translational normsto discuss the problems such as the C-E translation of civil law, the choice betweenadequate translation and acceptability translation, and the choice between sourcenorms or target norms, based on the four versions of the GCL of the PRC.Toury, who is a celebrated theorist of descriptive translation study, is illuminatedfrom Jarmes S. Holmes, maintains that translation is a norm-governed activity and hasput forward the theory of translational norms. Having referred the existent materialsand has found that such theory is general applied in literary translation, on thecontrary, the employment on legal translation is quite rare, the author of this thesis hasmainly tried to study on the legal linguistic differences between Chinese text andEnglish text so as to find out all kinds of norms when practically translating.In this thesis, the application of Toury’s theory of translational norms in thetranslation of the GCL of the PRC is mainly from four facets as follows: Firstly, theauthor of this thesis tries to make her effort to give an overview of the previousresearches on translational norms and “normality” in legal translation and find out thefeasibility when such theory is employed in the translation of the GCL of the PRC.Subsequently, the normality of legal language from their linguistic level andmorphological level is introduced. Last but not least, the author of the thesisilluminates operational norms in translations of the GCL of the PRC. Based on the comparative study of all translations from the angle of translators’ subjectivity,strategy norms, stylistic norms and linguistic norms of translating the GCL of the PRCare reconstructed.