On Archaisms In The C-E Translation Of Chinese Legislative Texts: A Corpus-based Approach

Under the impact of Plain English Movement in English-speaking countries,the archaic adverbial compounds composed of “here-,there-and where-” with propositions as suffixes — the stylistic expressions in legal English,were reduced to only the most commonly used ones in highly formalized legal texts.Despite the fact that numerous studies in China explored the translation of legal vocabularies,only a few concentrated on the above-mentioned archaic adverbial compounds,and even fewer adopted a corpus-based approach or analyzed them from the perspective of Information Bridges Model.Facing this,the present study collects official legislative texts and establishes two corpora,each containing a total of 1.3 million words,to probe into the use of archaisms in American original legislative texts and English translation of China's legislative texts.The present study in the first place establishes two corpora and processes them by means of using AntConc to obtain concrete data and gain an overview of archaisms used in the corpora.Secondly,the similarities and differences of the most commonly used archaisms are fully compared by observation and software analysis based on a large number of examples.Finally,the determining factors behind the application of archaisms in legal translation are discussed and identified from the perspective of Zhao's Information Bridges Model,which accounts for the phenomena observed under the bridges of socio-cultural systems and linguistic conventions.By conducting the study,the thesis has the following findings:(1)Archaisms are curtailed to only 0.1% in formal legal texts with most commonly used ones preserved with those rarely used ones discarded.The archaisms used in present American legislative texts and English translation of China's legislative texts can be classified into four categories.(2)“hereby” is simplified while “thereof” is flexibly adopted in the English translation of China's legislative texts,as is compared with the original American legislative texts.(3)The present study also sheds some light on factors that affect the use of archaisms from the perspective of Information Bridges Model through “archways” of the socio-cultural system and linguistic conventions.