A Study Of The English Translation Of Chinese Legal Terms From The Perspective Of Sarcevic's Translation Theory

With the continuous communication between China and foreign countries in aspects of politics,economy and culture,numerous foreigners come to China to study,live and engage in economic,cultural,educational and other activities.These foreigners must abide by Chinese laws in China.Thus,the translation and introduction of Chinese law become increasingly important.In legal translation,the translation of legal terms is directly related to the authority and credibility of the legal text of source language and it is a very important part of legal translation.Domestic studies on the translation of legal terms are mainly from the perspectives of relevance theory and functional equivalence theory,rarely from the perspective of Susan Sarcevic's legal translation theory.Sarcevic has exerted a great influence on the legal translation practice since her theory of legal translation has been proposed.Based on Sarcevic's theory of legal translation,the thesis studies the English translation version of Criminal Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China(289 articles,34405 words in total)and Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on Amending Criminal Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China(26 articles,5444 words in total)provided by pkulaw.com and attempts to answer the following two questions:1.What problems are there in the English translation of legal terms in the law and decision?2.What translation techniques should be adopted to solve these problems?After the analysis of the English translation of the law and decision,it is found that:(1)There are still slight differences between English translation of near equivalence legal terms and legal terms of source language therefore English translation of near equivalence legal terms does not present obviously the core meaning of legal terms of source language.(2)The scope of sense of English translation of partial equivalence legal terms is smaller or larger than the scope of sense of legal terms of source language.(3)There are not corresponding concepts between English translation of zero equivalence terms and legal terms of source language.In order to solve these problems,translators may adopt such translation techniques as literal translation,lexical expansion,descriptive paraphrase and neutral terms.