A Contrastive Study Of Conditional Sentences In Legislative English And Chinese With Their Mutual Translation

With an increasing number of international communications and other activities, legal translation gradually becomes a key point to the cross-regional and cross-cultural studies. As a special legal text, the lexical, syntactical and textual features of legislative text are always the emphasis of numerous scholars. It is easy to find out that, among all the syntactical forms used in legislative text, conditional sentence is of high frequency. Compared with its counterpart used in other types of texts, legal conditional sentence is found to be long and tedious. In addition, because of the different grammatical rules of English and Chinese, conditional sentences also differ from each other in English and Chinese legal texts.Given these differences, the author of this study collects a 500,000-word parallel database on the basis of current English and Chinese legislative texts, and extracts 4,498 parallel conditional sentences and seven frequently used English conditional subordinators. Through an all-round contrastive analysis, the author finds out that: of all the parallel legal sentences, there are 4,498 English and Chinese conditional sentences, which totally account 40% of the overall sentences; among all the English conditional sentences, 56% of them are introduced by subordinator “if”; all the English conditional sentences are introduced by explicit conditional subordinators, while of all the Chinese conditional sentences, only 25% of them are introduced by explicit Chinese conditional subordinators, 75% of the Chinese conditional sentences are introduced by implicit conditional subordinators, and in order to highlight the “conditional meaning”, both English and Chinese conditional clauses are tending to be “left dislocated”.When it comes to translation, based on these differences and similarities of conditional sentences in both English and Chinese legislative texts, translator should distinguish the fixed expressions of these two types of conditional sentences as well as their substantial features, follow and respect the expression habits of both source language and target language in the mutual translation process, summarize effective principles and strategies of translation, and finally realize the dual matching in their sense and forms.