A Study On English Translation Of Conditional Sentences In The Criminal Law Of The PRC

A more accurate English version of the Criminal Law of the PRC can better protect the people,the state and the society and people from other countries can learn about Chinese laws through their English versions.This study selects the English version of the Criminal Law of the PRC from PKU Laws Corpus.And then the author evaluates the translation quality of its conditional sentences from the perspective of five principles of legal translation with the help of the corpus research method,as well as the descriptive and quantitative research methods.The research mainly focuses on the3 questions as follows: 1)How are the conditional sentences in the translation text of the Criminal Law of the PRC distributed? 2)How are the main patterns used to translate the conditional sentences in the English version? 3)How are the deviations made in terms of accuracy and precision,consistency and identity,clarity and conciseness,professionalism,and standardized language respectively?The results show that 1)Conditional sentences account for more than a half in the English version of the Criminal Law of the PRC,among which IF-clauses take the largest part,accounting for 53.15%.The three most significant subordinators are“if”,“where”and“when”,which account for more than 95 percent.2)The fact-situation,which begins with“如果”is supposed to be translated into an IF-clause.WHERE-clause often introduces the case followed by IF-clause as the condition.The sentences containing the meaning of time are usually translated into WHEN-clause.“In case”and“in the event of”always introduce the conditions that are unlikely or uneasy to occur.And“provided”and“providing”can introduce the proviso,which contains the meaning of“if”and“but”.SHOULD-clause is similar to IN CASE-clause and IN THE EVENT-clause,but is not advisable to use in modern legal English.3)The author finds that there are 116 deviations occurring in the translation in total,most of which violate the principle of accuracy and precision.The deviations of accuracy and precision can be divided into four parts:mistranslation,inaccuracy,additional translation and omission.The violation of the principle of consistency and identity occurs when the words,phrases or clauses that repeatedly appear have no consistent and identical translations.The deviations of the principle of clarity and conciseness can be classified into two types:the deviations of clarity and the deviations of conciseness.The deviations of the principle of professionalism occur when some words can be replaced by more professional ones.And the deviations of the principle of standardized language happen when some expressions are too oral.This research offers the shortcomings of the present translation that should be taken care of for both translators and readers of the Criminal Law of the PRC so that the translation can be further improved.