Translators’ Creativity In Translation Of Conditional Sentences Of Legislations: From The Perspective Of Information Bridges

With a view to safeguarding the legitimate benefits and interests of the public and upholding fairness of legal procedures, improvement of legislative document translation quality becomes increasingly important and urgent. Considering the frequent use of conditional sentences, relevant studies prove of great significance. Additionally, with the wider resource sharing and overlapping between different disciplines, legal translation undergoes from strict literal translation, literal translation, idiomatic translation and even co-drafting in some bilingual or multilingual legislative countries. Legal translators are bestowed with a certain degree of freedom, i.e. creativity. Hence, how to be creative in translation is a focus of this current study.The present study takes the excerpts of Labor Contract Law of PRC and its two translation versions from CLIPS as subjects to explore translators’ creativity in translation of conditional sentences, which is manifested in macro information knot level, micro information element level and language level, mainly vocabulary choices. And this study explores whether such creativities are proper from the perspective of "information bridges".The findings suggest that information knot changes are relatively few, mainly including WB forward placement, WC backward placement, WP forward placement and WC omission in some cases, with WB movement that is mainly due to the necessity of linguistic convention and WC changes due to use of nominalization or authors’ mistake. Information elements changes comprise addition, replacement, deletion and rearrangement, which were mainly affected by linguistic conventions and legal system. And there are also differences in the management of the translation between the Chinese translators and foreign translators due to different law systems and understandings of the nature of politics and law.