Meaning Reconstruction In Translation Of Legal Works: A Study Of The Chinese Translation Of Economic Analysis Of Law

Legal translation is viewed as an act of communication that involves the transfer of messages from the source text to the target text. And messages have been further defined as the meaning of the source text; therefore, the translation of legal works is essentially the reconstruction of source-text meaning to the greatest possible degree. That can be quite demanding due to the differences between Chinese and English formal writing in terms of lexical choices, and syntactic and rhetorical structures.In this study, the author sets to analyze the Chinese translation of a most influential legal works, the 7th edition of Economic Analysis of Law, from the perspective of meaning reconstruction. Three major types of meaning, namely conceptual meaning, associative meaning and thematic meaning, is studied through the analysis of typical examples in the Chinese translation in order to figure out some applicable strategies for effective meaning reconstruction in the translation of legal works. To achieve that, the author first analyzes the reconstruction of conceptual meaning in the translation of both legal terms and ordinary words; and then the author explores the reconstruction of associative meaning in the translation of euphemisms, metaphors and personifications;furthermore, the author looks into the reconstruction of thematic meaning in the translation of subject clauses, passive sentences and attributive clauses. Strategies applied to the reconstruction of each category of meaning in the Chinese translation of Economic Analysis of Law are ascertained and the effectiveness of those strategies is evaluated to come up with valuable implications for meaning reconstruction in the translation of legal works.