Research On Translation Strategies Of Legal Terms Based On Corpus Analysis

Being a member of the WTO, legislation quality of China should be estimated by the WTO or other countries and regions. Therefore, whether the English versions of China's legislative texts could be accepted will affect its development and status in the world directly. Differences, especially differences of the usage of legal terms,can be found in comparison with English legislative texts and English versions of Chinese legislative texts, which can provide legal Chinese-English translators with great help and guidance. Three corpora are developed in this paper: UK's intellectual property laws corpus (Corpus A), English version of Chinese intellectual property laws corpus(Corpus B), and Chinese intellectual property laws corpus (Corpus C). Corpus A and Corpus B consist of the comparable corpora, Corpus B and Corpus C, parallel corpora.This paper, based on the theories of corpus linguistics, and statistics, firstly, analyzes the TF (Term Frequency) from the aspects of shared words and specialized words in comparable corpora, which is done on the basis of quantitative analysis in description.Secondly, with the assistance of quantitative analysis method, according to the value of the index of "Ratio" which is set up in this paper,shared words are selected as the research subjects whose ratio value is above 15 to be Group 1,whose ratio value is below 0.1 to be Group 2, and specialized words whose frequency is above 3 to be Group 3. Thirdly, guided by the Functional Equivalence Theory of Nida, with the translation examples involved the words of the three groups (in Corpus B and Corpus C as parallel corpora), problems are enumerated and illustrated, which have existed in the contemporary Chinese-English translation of Chinese intellectual property laws.Finally, relevant translation strategies, such as, diction, conversion and creation, have been put forward in order to improve the translation quality of the contemporary legislative text translation. It is hoped that this paper, by presenting and applying a mixed approach, can provide some help to translators to get more insight into the characteristics of English version of Chinese intellectual property laws,,with some relevant constructive suggestions to promote the legislative text translation as well.