A Study On The Standardization Of The English Translation Of The Verbs “规定” And “禁止” In Legislative Texts

Legal terms are the foundation of every legal text.However,sometimes,one word in a legislative text have different translations.Besides the reason that one text was translated by several translators,the translators’ different opinions on the definition of a term are also a reason for this phenomenon.Plenty of scholars advocate that it is necessary to standardize legal term translation,yet the boundary between legal terms and other words in legislative texts is fuzzy.Most of the scholars make judgments by their own experience which is relatively subjective.Defining legal terms thus seems crucial in the standardization of legal translation.Taking verbs“规定”and“禁止”as two research objects,this thesis explores the standardization of legal term translation,focusing on the answer three questions:First,in legislative texts,how to differentiate words with legal intent or common words from legal terms?Or how to define a legal term?Second,if the verbs can be defined as legal terms under the evaluation results of the lexical value system and term value system,how to standardize their translations?Third,if the verbs cannot be defined as legal terms,what are the feasible translations that can be used in legislative texts?From the perspective of defining terms,this thesis proposes a new framework,i.e.calculate the lexical value of the research objects,compare the lexical value with the average lexical value of basic verb vocabularies,as well as calculate the term value and analyze the results as auxiliaries to back up the conclusions,aiming to examine if the research objects can be deemed as legal terms objectively and subjective.Based on the result of the evaluation,it also explores suitable translations for standardization through professional-legal-dictionary-based analysis and corpus-based analysis.The research shows that the research object“规定”is more used as a basic word and shall not be define as a term.Its translation does not have to be standardized.While“禁止”can be define as a term and the translation“prohibit”shall be the top choice for standardization.This thesis is intended to draw attention to a new perspective on term definition.It provides theoretical instruction to the practice of legal term translation and seeks for contributing to the further theoretical study and practice of standardization of legal translation.