Term Translation Across Legal Systems

Being a pivot on the Belt and Road,India exerts a great influence on both the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road.The country also shares a competitive and cooperative relationship with China.Understanding India’s public,private and social laws in force is of great significance to the development of China-India relations.The Companies Act 2013 is an overhaul of the 1956 Act,which reformed the types of companies and the way companies are founded in India as well as introduced novel concepts such as “one-person company”.Indian laws are rooted in UK laws,the same goes for important concepts in the 1956 Act.Since India is a common law country,its concepts in the 2013 Act are very different from Chinese laws to the point where some concepts have no equivalents in Chinese,obscuring the context of the Act.As of now,there is still no relevant translation of the 2013 Act,which makes the translation a worthwhile effort.However,due to the author’s limited time and capacity,the author was only able to complete translating two chapters of the 2013 Act.In the proffered thesis,the author found relevant materials by exploiting online resources as well as printed documents.By analyzing the evolutionary history of Indian company laws,diving into pertinent laws such as UK Companies Act 2006 and its translation,and the bilingual version of The Hong Kong Companies Ordinance,the author was able to gain an overall understanding of Indian company laws.The author learned from the practice of the EU and Hong Kong regarding legal translation,and pursued the best translation for several groups of confusable terms in the excerpt of the 2013 Act.The most productive conclusion,or finding,that the author comes up with,is a method for term translation.The method developed consists of two steps:(1)determining a term’s meaning in the context of the 2013 Act,and(2)locating its most appropriate Chinese equivalent.The first step includes a flow chart which is shown in Chapter IV.The second step may vary depending on the results that the first step produces.It might include a search in parallel texts,legal research into secondary sources such as periodicals and academic papers,and a search in commercial codes,domestic and abroad.Using this method,the author categorized the translations of four groups of confusable terms into “near equivalence” and “partial equivalence”.Though the method is narrowly tailored to suit the 2013 Act and is not perfect,it can nevertheless be stretched to other researches,and the author hopes it might prove to be helpful in the future.