| Food safety situation is still grim in China,with food safety incidents occurring frequently.The formulation and implementation of Food Safety Law of the People's Republic of China aims at addressing the prominent problems in the field of food safety within legal framework.It is conducive to the reinforcement of the legislation in the social field and to the perfection of food safety laws and regulations in China,thus,offering institutional security for food safety supervision system and ensuring health and safety of the public.Legal terms are characterized by professionalism,formality,cultural specificity,polysemy and synonymy.So far,many scholars have conducted their research on legal terms translation from a variety of perspectives.At the micro level,translation strategy of linguistic features is emphasized,whereas at the macro level,communicative equivalence of legal terms and influence of legal culture are ignored.Owing to great discrepancy between common law system and China‘s socialist legal system in terms of legal cultures,the translation of legal terms,especially conceptual non-equivalence in the course of translation,confuses readers against different legal cultures.This thesis adopts functional equivalence proposed by ?ar?evi? as the major theoretical framework.The theory stresses that legal translation is an act of communication in the mechanism of the law and emphasizes that to achieve equivalent effect is the main purpose of translation.Besides,?ar?evi? divides the degree of equivalence into three categories: near equivalence,partial equivalence and non-equivalence.Meanwhile,this thesis integrates Cao‘s relevant statements on conceptual equivalence and model of translation competence.This thesis uses the Chinese version of Food Safety Law of the People's Republic of China and its two English versions as research data.One English version comes from Beijing Review and the other from USDA Foreign Agricultural Service.Based on Food Safety Law of the People's Republic of China,this thesis selects 265 Chinese legal terms from the original in terms of disciplinary category as well as GB 15091-95 Fundamental Terms of Food Industry.Combining the distinction between legal concepts and legal terms with theoretical models,this thesis makes comparative analysis of translation procedures of the selected terms and their influences on legal effect transmission based on qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis.The research findings are two folds.(i)Both of the English versions of Food Safety Law of the People's Republic of China fail,to a certain degree,to conform to the principle of consistency in legal term translation in the same context.By contrast,Beijing Review version is better than the other.(ii)Both of the English versions employ different translation procedures.In the case of conceptual equivalence,the English versions prefer literal translation;in the cases of near equivalence and partial equivalence,both of them do not show prominent difference for the frequency of occurrence of legal terms in question is relatively low and some translations of the said terms translation are the same for the two versions;in the case of non-equivalence,both of them address the issue in a similar way,whereas Beijing Review version stresses the use of paraphrasing to convey the legal effect equivalence.Translators should,therefore,determine the text type before making their choice of translation procedures.In terms of the translation purpose of legal effect equivalence,the Beijing Review version is relatively better.(iii)Since incongruity of legal terms poses a great challenge to the legal translator,a successful translator should be equiped with essential competency,which includes translational language competence,translational knowledge structures and translational strategic competence,so that they can achieve legal effect equivalence. |
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