Translation Of Legal Texts From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

In an era of globalization, legal translation is becoming increasingly important. It involves the solemn law field with strong professional and authoritative nature. It is really important and also difficult to give very accurate reproduction of the original legal information in the target language text and achieve equivalence in both legal language and legal function.The translation of legal text, especially that of legislative text, has to satisfy the requirement of preciseness and compactness, and produce identical legal effects in the target legal texts as in the original. Nida’s functional equivalence theory emphasizes the use of the closest natural equivalent language to reproduce the source language message and attaches great importance to the response of target readers, which is just what is demanded of legal translation. This thesis, taking the translation of Marriage Law in the Florida Statutes as a case study, discusses legal translation from the perspective of functional equivalence. Firstly, it gives a brief introduction to the functional equivalence theory and expounds the theory’s guiding significance in legal translation. Then it analyzes the lexical and syntactical features of legal English and summaries the basic principles for legal translation. At the lexical level, legal English is characterized by the frequent use of legal terms, common words with specific legal implication, archaic words, and words from French and Latin. At the syntactical level, legal English involves a lot of long and complex sentences, fixed sentence patterns and passive sentences. When translating legal texts, translators should observe three basic principles: preciseness and compactness, clearness and conciseness, professionalism and normalization. Lastly, this thesis, by analyzing examples taken from the author’s legal translation practice, explores some effective methods which can bring about the achievement of functional equivalence in legal translation. The thesis holds that by appropriately using such methods as deciding the meanings of words according to the context, seeking for corresponding words, translating in the original order, reconstructing and converting, the translator can faithfully and effectively transfuse the original information into the target text and cause equivalent response between the target and the original readers, thus achieving functional equivalence in legal translation.