Corpus-Based Features Analysis And Correlative Translation Principles On English Translation Version Of Chinese Foreign Economy Laws

As an English for special purpose, legal language is professional, which is legally binding.With the progress of the international communication, the accuracy and acceptability ofEnglish translation on Chinese laws and regulations is closely related to the degree of foreignexchange and trade. Therefore, through analysis of the existing English version of legaldocuments related to Chinese foreign trade and economy, the study has significance inontology and application research by means of summarizing the common features andproposing improvement strategy. Based on self-built corpus, this thesis will study features ofthe English versions of Chinese laws and present some improvement suggestions.In this paper, the corpus selected are representative Chinese legal texts and theircorresponding English versions related to China foreign trade and economy, includingForeign Trade Law of the PRC, Law of the PRC on Chinese-Foreign Equity Joint Ventures,Law of the PRC on foreign-capital Enterprise, Law of the PRC on Economic ContractsInvolving Foreign Interest. At the same time, this thesis chooses the Uniform CommercialCode of the USA as reference corpus and makes data statistics by adopting corpus tools, suchas AntConc, ParaConc and WordSmith. On the basis of quantitative and qualitative analysis,this thesis analyzes language features from the lexical, syntactic and textual levelsrespectively.Lexicons are the basic unit of legal text and it is helpful to grasp the specific features oflegal English translation, thus this thesis starts from lexical features analysis and furtherhighlights the exploration of text and sentence structures so as to study legal English syntaxand discourse features.After study and analysis, this thesis describes features of English legislative text asfollows: lexical level is characterized by high lexical density, rich token ratio, frequent use ofarchaic words and content words; syntactic level is featured by long sentence, frequent use of prepositional phrases and passive voice, appropriate use of modal verbs in accordance withlegal context, declarative sentence patterns as well as typical conditional clause; the featuresof textual level lie in highly-structured form, more conjunctions and reference consistency. Inview of the functional equivalence theory, this thesis proposes some improvement suggestionsfrom precision, consistency and standardized language principles via studies of the lexical,syntactic and textual features of English versions on Chinese foreign trade and economy laws,to achieve the equal acceptability and comprehensibility among bilingual text readers.Based on the study of features of English version related to China’s foreign trade andeconomic laws, this thesis discusses the problems existing in the translation andcorresponding causes, then makes a conclusion of translation principles based on the study. Tobe precise, the translation should keep consistent with the original text not only in vocabularylevel, but also in legal syntax and discourse structure. Through research and suggestion, thisthesis is helpful to understand features of English versions on China’s foreign trade andeconomic laws in certain degree, and to improve the quality of the legal text translation.