A Contrastive Analysis Of Reference In E-C Legal Texts And Its Reanslation

Text,as a language unit larger than sentences,the key to its analysis lies in cohesion.Halliday and Hasan define cohesion as “the explanation of one component depends on that of another”,namely,the correlation of the meaning of two components within the text which are not subject to syntactic structure.Cohesion is classified into two types: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion.Reference,as a typical grammatical cohesive device,is what cannot be ignored in textual analysis.Reference means the mutual explanation on the referential relationship between one component and anther component in the text.In the process of translating,reference plays an important role in the comprehension of texts.However,previous contrastive analysis of reference concentrates on general texts with little attention to legal texts.Therefore,it is valuable to supplement the research on reference in legal texts.This thesis,basing on the cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan,using the 160 articles in the parallel texts of Hong Kong Basic Law as the corpus,makes a contrastive analysis on the similarities and dissimilarities of reference between English legal texts and Chinese legal texts by quantitative analysis method from three aspects: personal reference,demonstrative reference and comparative reference.After analyzing the reasons causing the dissimilarities from the characteristics of language itself and the the characteristics of legal texts,the author presents corresponding translation strategies attempting to achieve the equivalence of translation.Such a research can promote people to have a more precise comprehension of legal texts for a better service in the process of E-C legal communication.