The Legislative Function And English Translation Of The “De” Structure:

With China’s rapidity in its opening-up, especially its integration into the international economy after joining the WTO, English translation of Chinese laws and regulations has become a significant part of China’s foreign legal exchanges and foreign trades. Regarding the “de” structure which appears with almost the highest frequency as the research object, this thesis discusses the function and English translation of the “de” structure in Chinese legislative texts in detail and tries to summarize the principles and strategies of Chinese legislative translation to achieve the effect of equivalence on the basis of translation equivalence theory. And the author hopes that this study can promote the prosperity and development in the study of translating Chinese laws and regulations.The“de”structure,as a unique syntactic structure in Chinese legislative texts,is of the strong Chinese national characteristics.The“de”structure origins from Chinese“者”structure which is commonly used in the ancient Chinese legislative texts,while there exist quantities of the“者”structure collocated with“诸......者”in The Tang Code(《唐律疏义》).The“de”structure is a form of syntactic structure that the nominal endocentric phrase omits its head noun bearing the nature and functions of nouns.Moreover,the“de”structure bears the functions of setting forth presumptions,informative storage as well as the head-noun omission.While English translation of the“de”structure can be generally divided into five categories:noun clauses,adverbial clauses,attributive clauses,non-finite verbs and prepositional phrases.All these five categories basically embody the semantic equivalence of the“de”structure,but we should also take its formal equivalence and cultural equivalence into account,so as to achieve the closest equivalence on the premise of ensuring the semantic equivalence.Equivalence which is widely applied in theory study including legal translation, as a theory in translation study, has always been the core concept of translation theory and is also regarded as one of the most controversial concepts in the study of translation. As we know, the process of translation is also the process of seeking the equivalence. Since various kinds of translation theories have developed prosperously, equivalence theory has a higher theoretical and practical value. In other words, equivalent translation directly affects the quality of translation and the discussion of translation methods. Therefore, it seems to be impossible to define this complex issue clearly, and translators can generally find the most appropriate equivalent expression in the target language as a certain word, a phrase or a sentence in its meaning in the original text in the process of translation so as to achieve the information equivalence in the same context between the original text and the target text. As a result, in terms of translation, equivalence theory is considered as one of the most fundamental and significant methods.This thesis adopts the prescriptive and descriptive research methods in which the prescriptive method is considered as a central one through looking for numerous reliable legal literatures as well as the related materials and books, which proves that translation equivalence theory has the guiding significance for the translation of legislative texts and is applied to the study on the English Translation of the “de” structure.