Chinese To English Translation Of Soft Legal Texts For The International Communication Of China’s Legal System: Issues And Solutions-a Functional Perspective

In spite of China’s rapid social and economic development and remarkableprogress in promoting the rule of law since the late1970s when China started toimplement the open-up and reform policy, the perception of China’s legal system bythe Western world remains seriously negative. This sad state of affairs is attributableto both the Western media’s overwhelmingly negative coverage of China, includingits legal system and the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of China’s efforts to dispelsuch misperception by providing information on its legal system to the outside world.Through an overview of the practice and academic research related to China’s effortsto introduce its legal system to the rest of the world, this author finds that suchinefficiency and ineffectiveness are due to two factors: the overdependence on hardlegal texts, i.e., traditional legal texts such as laws and legal documents, while softlegal texts, typically law-themed media texts, which can reach a far wider audiencethan the hard legal texts, fail to receive their due share of resource and attention; theother factor is the poor quality of translated soft legal texts, which is taken as the topicof the present research.The present research then chooses to adopt the German functional approach totranslation to tackle the problem poor quality of translation related to the China’sefforts to introduce its legal system to the outside world, because the Germanfunctional approach is in perfect concordance with the translation rules and principlesdrawn up by veteran Chinese translators and journalists engaged in China’sinternational publicity efforts. After an analysis of the Chinese to English translationfor the purpose of introducing China’s legal system according to the Germanfunctionalism, especially the Skopos theory, the study identifies three types oftranslation problems in the Chinese to English translation for the internationalcommunication of China’s legal system, namely, pragmatic translation problems,cultural translation problems and linguistic translation problems. This study also finds out that such translation, given its Skopos being providing balanced information onChina’s legal system and therefore the target texts mainly serve an informativefunction, is instrumental in nature and that the target texts mainly serve two functions,namely informative and appellative functions. On the basis of these findings, thepresent research proposes that the top-down functionalist approach should be adoptedto identify and overcome translation problems: on the basis of a thorough comparisonof the profiles of source text and target text in light of the translation brief, theinformation offer should be processed in light of the differences between thecommunicative situation between source text producer and the communicativesituation between the target text producer and addressee, and the translation problemsshould be solved in the order of pragmatic translation problems, cultural translationproblems and linguistic translation problems, and the target text should conform to thecultural conventions and norms and linguistic rules of the target culture, instead of thesource culture.