On The Translation Of Chinese Legislative Texts From The Perspective Of Discourse Information

In the context of economic globalization especially after China’s entry into WTO,legal communication between China and other countries has been thriving in economyand trade and other fields. Legal translation, legislative translation in particular, hasbeen gaining grounds. Various translations of Chinese legislative texts have emerged.It is quite common to find different translations of the same legislative text, which onone hand meets the demands of legal practice and economic activities, has also givenrise to various problems due to the disparity in translation standards and evaluationnorms, etc. Studies concerning this problem are conducted, most of which either focuson micro-issues such as the translation strategy of certain terms, or macro-problemssuch as principles, norms and assessment standards of legal translation. Up to now, nowidely-recognized conclusions have been reached.Given that China1is a country with a monolingual jurisdiction, where only lawsand regulations stipulated in Chinese possess legal effect, their English translations,whatever the translation purposes are, can all be taken as texts for informationpurpose, which further proves the importance of studying legislative translation fromthe perspective of discourse information. This thesis intends to, from the perspectiveof legal discourse information, study the characteristics of various translations of thesame legislative text.The author reviews relative literature on legal translation and studies on Chineselegislative translation, adopts Du’s Tree Model of Information Structure of LegalDiscourse and Model of Discourse Information Element (2007) as thetheoretical basis, using the discourse information tagging software for data collection,and carries out a case study on the six translations of Zhonghua Renmin GongheguoLaodong Hetong Fa, which is among the laws of top-importance in foreign-relatedlegal practice. The author conducts information tagging of ST and the six translations on information structure and information elements, then compares and analyzes thedata of the six translations from various perspectives in order to explore theirdifferences and similarities in transmission of the discourse information of ST.Discussion of the tagging results has found that the hypothesis proposed in theintroduction part does not stand solid, as the word count of a translation is notnecessarily positively related to its realization of discourse information of the ST.Besides, it is indicated by the comparison between the standard translation and othertranslations that the standard translation is not the best in realization of the discourseinformation of the ST. The study may shed some light on future studies of legaltranslation from the perspective of discourse information, provide some reference forcompetent legislative branches in establishing rules and norms of legal translation,and offer an innovative research perspective for future researchers in legal translationevaluation.