A TAP-based Study Of Translation Strategies For Legal Lexical Gaps In English-to-Chinese Translation

Legal lexical gaps, the absence in the target language of an equivalent for a legal term in the source language, are a ubiquitous phenomenon in such cross-cultural and inter-juristic communication as legal translation. The differences between legal systems, legal cultures and economic development in which two languages operate make legal lexical gaps difficult to handle. The absence of sources and references in English-to-Chinese( "E-C") legal translation makes this problem harder to deal with in E-C legal translation.In order to improve this situation, this thesis attempts to gain some insights into the translation strategies for bridging legal lexical gaps from a process-oriented perspective by viewing translation strategies as problem-solving procedures taken by translators in the translation process as a complement to the theoretical studies. The TAP method is thus introduced to probe into the translation process in the hope of providing a new perspective for the studies of translation strategies for tackling legal lexical gaps, a data reference to future empirical studies on the same and some specific translation strategies for coping with legal lexical gaps in E-C legal translation.The TAP experiment is designed according to the triangulation module, consisting of TAPs, questionnaire and translated text analysis. 23 participants are required to verbalize their thoughts as they translate a group of English legal texts containing five legal lexical gaps. Their verbalization is recorded and 20 participants’ recording is later transcribed into TAPs after data evaluation. The TAPs transcribed are coded according to the checklist of strategies developed on the basis of Mondahl & Jensen’s problem sequences and O’Malley & Chamot’s cognitive and metacognitive strategies.The qualitative analysis is aimed at establishing a checklist of specific strategies for bridging legal lexical gaps. 19 translation strategies for bridging legal lexical gaps are applied by the participants in E-C translation process. Among them there are eight reception strategies, seven production strategies and four evaluation strategies.The quantitative analysis is aimed at revealing the patterns of the translation strategies for bridging legal lexical gaps by the frequency of strategies and sequences of strategies. The frequency of strategies shows that general search is the most employed strategy while background search is the least one, implying that the participants, when encountering receptive problems, tend to seek help from outer world by searching resources instead of from their background knowledge. More reception strategies are taken than production strategies in the translation process of legal lexical gaps, signifying that the participants encounter more receptive problems than productive problems. The sequences of strategies show that most translation processes flow from reception to production. There are two types of short sequences frequented most which can serve as the basic units of sequences of strategies, arranging and combining in different ways to form longer sequences. They can also be inserted by or combined with other strategies to form new sequences. All the long and complicated sequences of strategies can be derived from the two basic units.The translated texts analysis combined with the analysis of translation strategies reveals that the participants prefer to adopt an equivalent which is existent and common in the Chinese culture, or failing that, they tends to use literal translation as translated texts. Intra-textual strategies such as linguistic analysis and contextualization can help to avoid an unacceptable equivalent while extra-textual strategies such as situational search and verification can help to produce better translated texts.