On English Translation Of Negatives In Chinese Legislative Texts:a Parallel Corpus-based Approach

The law is primarily about what people can do and cannot do based on legal provisions.To achieve the latter,negatives must be used in legislative texts.So far,many studies have focused on negatives,while just a few have focused on the translation of negatives,and even fewer on the translation of negatives in legislative texts.The study examines the English translation of negatives in Chinese legislative texts with a parallel corpus-based approach.Chinese legal articles containing negatives,together with their English translations,were first extracted from an online Chinese-English parallel corpus of Chinese laws,and then they were constructed into a mini-corpus with about 634,290 Chinese words and 10,436 Chinese negatives.All the negatives were classified into three types: negatives indicating Condition,negatives indicating Disposal and negatives indicating Sanction.The corpus retrieval tool AntConc3.2.1 was employed to collect data from the mini-corpus.The results show that,(1)the most frequently used negatives in Chinese legislative texts is those indicating Condition,the second most is those indicating Disposal and just a few of them are those indicating Sanction;(2)the Chinese negatives indicating Condition are usually translated into lexical items with negative affixes or with negative meanings,and some are also translated into the syntactic negative form: be/do/have + negative markers or their variations;(3)most of the Chinese negatives indicating Disposal are translated by way of syntax,and the most widely used form is modal verbs + negative markers or their variations;(4)in the case of the Chinese negatives indicating Sanction,their English translation method are applied in the syntactic level.The results of this study can not only contribute to the future research of the negatives in Chinese legislative texts,but also can be helpful to improve the quality of their translation.