On The Stylistic Features Of The English Translation Of China's Intellectual Property Laws And Regulations

As globalization continues to take its course, China has more and morelegislative communication and exchange with the outside world. Take the example oflaws and regulations in intellectual property protection, China has signed31international conventions ever since1957. As stipulated in some of internationalconventions, all member states should make adjustments in their laws and regulationsso as to make sure that the international conventions can be implemented domestically.China has made several amendments to its relevant laws and regulations. It isnecessary to translate our laws and regulations if we want to show the world how farwe have come in intellectual property legislation. Therefore, it is obvious that thetranslation of China's laws and regulations has become an irreplaceable link in ourlegislative communication and exchange with the international community. However,some researchers have pointed out that the style of the translation of Chinese laws isvery different from that of English laws.This research takes six China's major laws and regulations regarding intellectualproperty, their English translations and four major laws of the same kind in the U.S.A.and U.K. as research materials. It builds a comparable corpus and conducts acorpus-based study of the stylistic features of the translation of China's intellectualproperty laws and regulations. After an in-depth literature review, this researchclassifies the stylistic features of legal English and legal translation into three levels,namely lexical level, syntactic level and textual level. Then this research collects,compares and contrasts the data of stylistic features on every level and comes to findout the unique stylistic features of the translation of China's intellectual laws andregulations.On the lexical level, this thesis looks at such parameters such as word length,lexical diversity, lexical density and the use of archaic words. The research finds thatCorpus TT has longer average word length, lower lexical density and lower lexicaldiversity. This is interesting because this means that even though Corpus TT uses less diversified vocabulary, it uses longer words which help it to maintain a formal style.Also, Corpus TT uses more archaic words, but the archaic words in Corpus TT arestill less diversified.On the syntactic level, this thesis examines such parameters such as sentencelength, the use of modal verbs and passive sentences. Research finds that on CorpusTT has shorter average sentence length, uses more modal verbs and more passivesentences. In this way, we can see that the style of TT is quite different from that ofNTT.On the textual level, this thesis selects personal pronouns and conjunctions as theparameters. Research finds that Corpus TT uses more personal pronouns and moreconjunctions. The number of personal pronouns in Corpus TT is remarkably higherthan that in Corpus NTT, which should raise our alarm. Translators should attentionand refrain from using so many personal pronouns in their translation becausepersonal pronouns can lead to an informal style.