A Contrastive Study Of The Two English Versions Of The General Principles Of The Civil Law Of P.R.C. From The Perspective Of Register Theory

With the deepening of reforming and opening up and the extent to which China is involved in the world trade system, the foreign investment swarming into the Chinese market has just been as many as the Chinese corporations going abroad and looking for business opportunities. Be it "swarming in’" or "going abroad", legal issues are definitely among the things that they will have to face, and most of these legal issues fall into the jurisdiction of foreign legal practice. Due to the divergences between legal cultural backdrop and legal provisions, many a contradiction and difference are bound to come forth during the process of chino-foreign cooperation. In order to reduce and resolve these contradictions and differences, communications and negotiations will be needed, sometimes even legal resort becomes inevitable. All of these will have to be done by law practitioners through professional English. Consequently, in the age when internationalization tendency is becoming increasingly prominent, the mastery of professional English has become a must-have in the area of law practice.Despite the fact that the legal profession in China has been sparing no effort to translate a great amount of foreign legal information into Chinese, thus pushing ahead the study and practice of law in China and laid an indispensable academic foundation for the unprecedented prosperity of law in China in the past 20 years. It must be, however, pointed out that legal translation, an emerging discipline as a result of the cross disciplines of law and English, is still lagging behind and remains far from satisfactory.Currently, it’s disappointing that there have been few studies on the translation of GPCL as well as the application of register theory. Most studies on the translation of GPCL focus on modal verbs alone. Part of the reason could be the professionalism and complexity of GPCL, which seems daunting and requires solid and comprehensive knowledge of law as well as excellent language proficiency and translation skills. GPCL is the foundation of private law and covers every corner of the area of civil law; it’s closely linked to every aspect of day-to-day life. Given this status, relevant study is needed.This thesis employs register theory, one of the most influential linguistic theories proposed by Halliday from systematic functional linguistics, to contrast the two different English versions of the quasi-civil code of China, the General Principles of the Civil Law of the People’s Republic of China (referred to as GPCL in this thesis), and to assess the merits and demerits of each version in each of the dimensions under the guidance of register theory.According to Halliday’s theory, register is the functional variety of text for a certain communicative purpose with regard to a specific communicative occasion. It’s the comprehensive embodiment of various parameters---namely field, tenor and mode. Field of register refers to the nature or theme of communication. Tenor of register marks the relationship between the two parties involved in the communication. Mode of register refers to the channel and medium of language communication. All three parameters work together to decide the characteristics of the text. The change of any would lead to the change of the meaning of communication, further causing the variance of language and giving rise to different registers. The distinctive advantage of register theory is that it combines language with social activities. Unlike other linguistic theories, analysis is not just done from the stylistic perspective and social dimension is brought in.The first chapter covers the significance and necessity of legal translation. The second chapter reviews the history of legal text translation both at home and abroad as well as domestic research on the English translation of GPCL. The third chapter expounds on register theory and set forth the theoretical framework. The fourth chapter summarizes the features of legal English. The fifth chapter is the application of register theory in the contrastive analysis. Two versions of the English translation of GPCL are analyzed in the three dimensions of register theory, namely field, tenor and mode. The last chapter includes the practical implications of this study, limitations and suggestions for future researches. This thesis aims to apply register theory to the study of and guidance on legal translation.