A Study Of The English Translation Of Chinese Legal Texts From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

With the ever-increasing economic globalization and regional economic integration, China’s economy has become a new bright spot with more frequent exchanges of foreign trades after its entrance into WTO. Law, as an assurance of trades has an increasingly higher status, which leads to a growing need for translation of Chinese legal texts. However, owing to a late start, there exists a distinctive gap between translation of legal texts and other respectively mature translations. The specialty and particularity of legal language and legal texts as well as the differences between Chinese and English make it harder for the translators to do their work.The thesis looks beyond the traditional theories for analyzing legal translation and researches from the perspective of adaptation theory. A comprehensive analysis of C-E translation of legal texts is presented from four research angles--contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and the salience of the adaptation processes. It has been found that for the sake of an effective communication between Chinese laws and English laws, translators are required to appropriately give play to subjectivity and dynamically adapt themselves to context, legal culture and linguistic characteristics of Chinese and English legal texts.