Reproducing Frozen Style Of Legal Texts Under The Guidance Of Text Typology Theory

With the acceleration of globalization,China's communication and cooperation with other countries(regions)in many aspects,like economics,politics,culture,technology are getting more and more frequent.And China can only protect its own rights and interests while complying with intermational rules with a better understanding of foreign laws and regulations.So it's extremely important and necessary to translate legal texts into Chinese version.However,how to eonvey the information eontained in the source text faithfully and accurately and make the translation conform to features of Chinese legal language is still a big problem for translators due to the peculiar features of English legal language and the major difference between Chinese and English legal language.This is a report on E-C translation practice of Food Safety Authority of Ireland Act,1998.Food Safety Authority of Ireland Act,1998 is a legislative text enacted to establish the Food Safety Authority of Ireland and it has typical linguistic features of a legal text This task adopts Reiss's text typology theory to 'guide the whole translation.According to Reiss5s classification,the source text,Food Safety Authority of Ireland Act,1998 belongs to the informative text with expressive and operative features.Therefore,information should be conveyed accurately and the formality of the target text should be guaranteed.Literal translation is mainly used while flexible translation methods,like addition,omission,repetition,conversion,division,negation,and restructuring are employed aceording to different cases.This translation is carried out under the guidance of text typology theory,aiming to reproduce frozen style of the source text on lexical level,syntactical level and textual level.On lexical level,for translation of archaic words,borrowed words from Latin and French and legal terms,literal translation is adopted;for translation of juxtaposed synonyms,the meaning they all include is used to avoid ambiguity;for translation of general words with legal meaning,whether to choose a general meaning or choose a legal meaning depends on the context;for translation of vague words,literal translation and negation are mainly used to ensure preciseness and conciseness of the translation;for translation of polysemous terms,different equivalents are adopted due to different context,which make it one of the major difficulties of legal translation;On syntactical level,for translation of long and complicated sentences,logic relationship among different components is analyzed first,and then meaning of the original sentence is grasped precisely,finally,proper translation methods are used while division and restructuring are mainly adopted to translate long and complicated sentences,making the translation conform to habitual expressions of Chinese legal text;passive voice and nominal structures are primarily converted into verbs and active voice to produce idiomatic Chinese translations and it should be noted that while translating passive voice,Chinese active voice and Chinese passive voice are compared to choose the appropriate one;the translation of modal verbs also depends on the context.On textual level,literal translation is used to ensure formality and consistency of the target text.I hope this thesis can serve as a reference for the practice of E-C translation of legal texts in the future,especially in the field of food safety.