Shift Of Metafunctional Parameters In The English Versions Of Chinese Legislative Texts

As China?s economy develops fast, crossing-border associations become more and more frequent. It is very urgent to inform the foreigners, especially the foreign businessmen of the Chinese laws and rules in order to stabilize the social order and crack down the increasing foreign crimes in China. Practically, nowadays many foreigners who are from law-oriented countries are very blind of Chinese laws and regulations because of the lack of standard and accurate English versions. Some foreigners even complain that they have no idea about which department they should seek for help when their rights are violated by others in China. Legislation is the first step to build a rule-by-law country. As China is dedicated to updating the laws and regulations all over the nation to better serve the economic and social development, the corresponding foreign versions are falling behind. With deeper integration into the international arena, legislation translation, especially the standard and unified English translation of the legislative texts, should be put on agenda in China.In the present study, one of Chinese legislative texts: the Criminal Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China(as amended 2012)(“Criminal Procedure Law”) released in the year 2012 by the National People?s Congress is selected. This is a procedure law and illustrates the detailed procedures when it comes to filing, investigating,judging and implementing the consequence of criminal crimes. There is no official English version about this newly-issued legislative text.Starting from the Metafunctional theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL), this thesis spots the shifts of Metafunctional parameters in two English versions of Criminal Procedure Law with the hope of broadening the study of translation shift. Then it makes evaluation of those shifts of Metafunctional parameters based on the extent of the realization of the communication purpose of the translation of this legislative text. Under the relevance theory, this thesis further explores the reasons behind the shifts of Metafunctional parameters from the objective and subjective aspects. Because legal translator is the subjective factor behind shifts of Metafunctional parameters, whether the Shift is evaluated as negative or positive is almost determined by the ability of legal translator. Therefore, this study tries to assess the ability of translator and the quality of translation by and large from the perspective of Shift of Metafunctional parameters. During this process, an operational way combining the qualitative and quantitative methods is adopted and world-famous corpora(BNC, COCA etc.) and legislative texts of western countries are appealed to as reference. Because the translation of legislative text is the key to the success of transcultural legal communication, the ultimate goal is to facilitate a more standard and accurate English version of this Chinese legislative text from the perspective of Shift of Metafunctional parameters.