Pragmatic Enrichment In Translating Chinese Legislative Texts From The Perspective Of Legal Cultural Context

Translation is a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communicative activity.Thus the influence of cultural context on translation can not be overlooked.With the increasingly close relationship of politics,economy and trade between China and Anglo-American countries,more and more legal affairs come into being,which makes the translation of legislative texts particularly important.Different legal cultures between China and Anglo-American countries bring about the discrepancies of legal concepts,inconsistency of the expression of legal language and so forth.Therefore,translators should pay attention to the legal cultural context on which they depend in translating legislative texts.Then reasonable pragmatic processing,namely pragmatic enrichment,has to be made on uncertain semantic information of the original.Pragmatic enrichment belongs to lexical pragmatics.It is a process by which communicators make some pragmatic processing of verbal stimuli based on context in communication,including pragmatic enrichment of a word,structure,even utterance in a certain context.Based on the different legal cultural factors between Chinese legislative text and English legislative text,this paper analyzes pragmatic enrichment in translating Chinese legislative text from the perspective of legal cultural context.Firstly,this paper gives a brief introduction of legal cultural factors,including the history of law,legal system,mode of thinking,religion and the use of legal language.Moreover,this paper analyzes the differences of legal cultural factors between China and Anglo-American countries.Then,based on Sequeiros' s classifications of pragmatic enrichment,this paper probes into pragmatic enrichment in translating Chinese legislative text from the perspective of legal cultural context.They are temporal and spatial enrichment,enrichment based on the thematic roles,enrichment based on discourse relations and enrichment based on implicatures.By analyzing pragmatic enrichment in translating Chinese legislative text,the author hopes to help the target readers have a better understanding of the spirit of law conveyed by the original text and achieve the successful communication between Chinese legal culture and Western legal culture.