| Culture-loaded words are those words and expressions that contain unique cultural connotations.In English legal texts,there are also a large number of culture-loaded words.These culture-loaded words present a kind of distinct legal culture.Many scholars have studied the translation of culture-loaded words,but the translation of culture-loaded words in English legal texts from the perspective of relevance theory is rarely studied.This thesis,based on relevance theory,especially relevance translation theory,explores the translation of culture-loaded words in English legal texts,attempting to answer the following questions.(1)How does the translator find the optimal relevance?(2)How does the translator make the translated text of legal culture-loaded words resemble the source text?(3)How does the translator match the original author’s intentions with the target audience’s expectations? And the findings are summarized as follows.Firstly,in order to find optimal relevance,the translator can choose to accept the source cultural context,neglect the source cultural context,or supplement the target cultural context to achieve the optimal relevance in the process of translating the legal culture-loaded words.Secondly,owing to the uniqueness of legal culture-loaded words,the translated text and the source text cannot achieve complete resemblance,and the translator usually adopts indirect translation to translate these legal culture-loaded words in order to achieve interpretive resemblance between the source text and the translated text.Thirdly,in order to make the cultural connotations of the legal culture-loaded words successfully be conveyed to the target audience,the translator should accurately identify the original author’s intentions and predict the target audience’s relevant expectations so that the intentions can be matched with the expectations.A study on the translation of legal culture-loaded words from the perspective of relevance theory attempts to provide more references for the further study of Chinese legal translation. |
