A Study On Legal Translation From The Perspective Of Register Theory

In terms of the life-long development of individuals,early childhood education plays a vital role in people's lives.However,there still exists a great many problems in the present development of early childhood education in China,which are even aggravated by the lack of national laws and policies related to early childhood education.Furthermore,the inadequacy in the number of kindergartens caused by more children born to families after the overall implementation of the two-child policy in China has resulted in the fact that it is more difficult for left-behind children and migrant children in cities from lowSES families in urban and rural areas to get access to kindergartens.On the contrary,early in 1965,the U.S.carried out an early childhood education program named Head Start Programs,and it has provided 36 million children in low-SES families with early childhood education services of high quality under the legal support provided by Head Start Program Performance Standards and others.Therefore,the comprehensive early childhood education service system implemented by Head Start Programs will provide a reference for the policy-making on early childhood education in China.As one of the important theories in systemic functional linguistics,Halliday's Register Theory emphasizes the decisive role of register on meaning and language construction.Different registers are determined by different fields,tenors and modes,thus creating different meanings and stylistic features.Field refers to the institutional setting in which a piece of language occurs,tenor refers to the relationship between the participants,and mode refers to the channels of communication adopted.As the legal support for Head Start Programs,Head Start Program Performance Standards has specialized legal language and unique ways to organize language,and in turn,its unique field,tenor and mode together form a unique register.The Register Theory thus exerts a positive significance on dealing with relevant problems met in legal translation.At present,there is a lack of translating legal text regarding early childhood education both at home and abroad,let alone the studies on the legal text translation of early childhood education.Therefore,the English-Chinese translation of Head Start Program Performance Standards is able to fill the research gap in this field and provide a better reference for exploring and discussing solutions to such problems.After analyzing linguistic features of the excerpts of the source text under the guidance of Register Theory,the author finds that at the lexical level there are legal terms,ordinary words with legal meanings,archaic words and archaic phrasal prepositions;at the syntactic level there are modal verbs,passive voice,long and complex sentences and conditional sentences;at the textual level there is reference,substitution,conjunction and lexical cohesion used to realize textual coherence.This thesis is intended to center on the translation of Head Start Program Performance Standards from English to Chinese under the guidance of Register Theory.Under the guidance of field,in order to maintain the legal field and the ideational meaning of the source text,the translation of legal terms adopts literal translation so as to retain their legal meanings;under the guidance of tenor,in order to increase the formality and represent the interpersonal relationship of the source text,translation techniques such as addition,division,linear translation and shift are adopted to reflect them from the translation of modal verbs,passive voice,long and complex sentences and conditional sentences;under the guidance of mode,in order to represent the textual meaning of the written language,the cohesive devices in the source text such as reference,substitution,conjunction and lexical cohesion are kept to maintain cohesion.On the basis of this,the register features of the source text are reproduced to the greatest extent.Through the study,the author of this thesis finds that the Register theory is applicable to guide the analysis of linguistic features of legal texts and the translation of legal texts,which could provide new references for the practice of legal translation.