A Corpus-Based Study On Linguistic Features Of English-Translated Texts Of China's Commercial Laws

With the acceleration of globalization,more and more foreign investment is pouring into China.China's commercial laws become obviously important to regulate the business activities of both domestic and foreign enterprises,but the insufficient English translation of China's commercial laws hinders the development of the economy.The author of the thesis conducts two-facet contrast,namely,a contrast between source texts of China's commercial laws and their translated texts,and a contrast between the translated texts and the original English legal texts aiming to find out problems existing in the translation of China's commercial laws.After reviewing the researches of legal translation and corpus-based translation,the author builds both parallel and comparable corpora to study the linguistic features of the translated texts of China's commercial laws at lexical,syntactic and textual level.With the consistence of both quantitative and qualitative approaches,the author thus has the following observations and findings.Based on the parallel corpus(corpus of source texts and translated texts),it can be observed that compared with source texts of China's commercial laws,the translated texts have different linguistic features.As for the lexical feature,its lexical density is lower than that of the source texts.Secondly,its syntactic features are characterized by the adoption of longer sentence,much more modal verbs and passive clauses.Thirdly,at textual level,conjunctions are more widespread in it than that of source texts.Besides,its standardized format is also different from that of source texts.On the basis of comparable corpus(corpus of translated texts and original texts),the author finds out that the linguistic features of translated texts also differ from that of original English legal texts.The translated texts feature relatively great lexical density,type/token ratio,more frequent use of archaic words.Secondly,their syntactic features are characterized by shorter average sentence length,less application of nominalization and passive voice,more use of modal verbs.At textual level,the translated texts are typical of relatively less use of conjunctions.According to the above data discussion and analyses,the author finds out that the quality of the translated texts of China's commercial laws is approximately satisfactory,and some translated versions of laws are outstanding.However,there still exist some problems in translate texts,such as the overuse and misuse of modal verbs and informal use of conjunctions,especially conditional conjunctions.Another problem is the use of passive voice and nominalization is not as widespread as the original legal texts.Therefore,the use of modal verbs and conjunctions should be more prudent,and the use of passive voice and nominalization should be more initiative.The major findings obtained from this thesis have some implications.Firstly,the findings can help the translators have a clearer understanding of the linguistic features of English legal texts and improve their translation quality.Secondly,this corpus-based research creates a new model for the study of other kinds of texts,such as literary texts and scientific texts.Thirdly,the findings can provide specific data and authentic examples for the teachers of legal English to enrich their teaching contents.