Functional Equivalence Approach To The Legal Term Translation Influenced By Legal Cultural Differences

With China’s rapid economic growth and rising international status, a large number of legal documents of our country have been translated to foreign languages. Meanwhile, we have accelerated the speed of learning from other countries for the sake of participating in the political and economic activities more smoothly in the international community. During the process, we will inevitably draw on the experience of other nation’s legislation, especially the English-speaking countries, which will necessarily result in the translation of the relevant legal documents written in English. As legal terms are contained in those legal materials, we have to deal with the translation of them. Moreover, since legal terminology is the basic element of legal language, the translation of the legal terms will determine the quality of the whole translated legal texts. However, legal terms in source language can hardly find out the exact equivalents in target language, which is caused by the cultural difference between them, especially the legal cultural difference. Therefore, legal term translation becomes a tough task. The author of this paper tries to take a functional equivalence approach to the legal term translation influenced by legal cultural differences.The author first makes a brief introduction to legal culture including its definition, structure and characteristics. The author then introduces the definition, sources and characteristics of legal terms and analyzes the status quo of and problems in legal term translation. Through the analysis the author finds out that among the common problems of legal term translation are: catching the meaning of terms literally out of the context, failing to find equivalents and making blind literal translation. She also finds out that the legal cultural difference is one of the major causes for all these problems. Then the author analyzes the influences of legal cultural differences on legal term translation from the perspective of legal system, national culture and mode of thinking.In terms of theory, the author studies Functional Equivalence Theory proposed by Nida and ?ar?evi?’s viewpoints about functional equivalence. They both regard translation as a process of communication and emphasize that the target language should have an equivalent effect as the source language. Besides, in order to meet the requirement of legal translation, ?ar?evi? divides the degree of functional equivalence in great detail: near equivalence, partial equivalence and non-equivalence. Taking ?ar?evi?’s classification as foundation, Cao’s relevant theory as a supplement and classical examples from Chen Zhongcheng as supporting data, the author elaborates legal term translation methods from four aspects: literal translation can be adopted in the case of conceptual equivalence; functional equivalents can be employed in the case of near equivalence; lexical expansion can be conducted in the case of partial equivalence and finally paraphrasing, neutral terms, borrowings and neologism can be adopted in the case of non-equivalence. No matter what method is adopted, it is aimed to find the corresponding terms in the target legal culture so that the receptors of the translated language will get the same information as the receptors of the source language.