A Frame Approach To Legal Translation:Translation Of Legal Rules And Regulations

With the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative and the Strategy of Comprehensively Prompting the Rule of Law,legal translation is getting increasing attention in China.Legal translation plays an important role in China's communication with foreign countries.It helps in impressing foreigners with the Chinese government's adherence to rule of law,and letting foreigners know more about Chinese economy,politics,culture,and society.Legal translation is a cross-regional,cross-border,cross-professional,cross-language,cross-legal system,and cross-cultural communicative activity.There are differences between laws in different regions within one same country or between laws in different countries,differences between legal systems or legal languages within one same culture or between legal systems or legal languages in different cultures,and differences between the professional legal language and the ordinary language within one same language.Researchers influenced by the classical Aristotelian view on categories and the linguistics for the previous decades didn't carry out a systematic analysis of these differences.Instead,they merely gave an overview of such differences,and proposed to adopt an approach to the building of correspondence between such differences based on the idealized presupposition of equivalences between meanings of different words,types of legal texts in different legal languages,and functions between different legal languages.However,there are problems like translation disunity,disqualification of translators arising in legal translation practice.Such an approach to legal translation cannot get these problems solved in a satisfying way.Benefiting from these previous researches,this dissertation,from the perspective of a cognitive frame,and taking translation of legal rules and regulations as an example,approaches the building of correspondence in legal translation and mainly focuses on three questions as follows:(1)What are these approaches to the building of correspondence we would focus on and choose to follow within the frame of translation of legal rules and regulations?(2)What are the factors causing difficulties in following such approaches to the building of correspondence within the frame of translation of legal rules and regulations?(3)How should we build correspondence in adopting such approaches to translation of legal rules and regulations?To find answers to these three questions,first,this dissertation,according to the frame theory,analyzes the three fundamental components of the frame of translation of legal rules and regulations,aligns language and translators of legal rules and regulations with attributes in the frame of translation of legal rules and regulations,environments accompanying translation of legal rules and regulations with constraints in the frame of translation of legal rules and regulations,and approaches to the building of correspondence in translating legal rules and regulations with structural invariants in the frame of translation of legal rules and regulations,and primarily defines the approaches to the building of correspondence within the frame of translation of legal rules and regulations.Based on such analsis and definition,this dissertation,according to the theory concerning hierarchy of cognitive frames,clarifies the prototypical value for each attribute and constraint of the frame of translation of legal rules and regulations,and evokes the sub-frames by these prototypical values within the frame of translation of legal rules and regulations.Then,in perspectivizing the relationship between such sub-frames evoked by such prototypical values within the frame of translation of legal rules and regulations,this dissertation visualizes three specific approaches to the building of correspondence between legal language sub-frames,to the building of correspondence between legal language environment sub-frames,and to the building of correspondence between translators' known knowledge sub-frames,and takes a detailed analysis of these three approaches.Second,this dissertation analyzes the non-equivalence phenomenon between such sub-frames encountered in approaching the building of their correspondence,detects the factors causing such non-equivalence,and takes a systematic comparison between the basic components and hierarchies of such non-equivalent sub-frames.Third,this dissertation analyzes the similarities between such non-equivalent sub-frames,and proposes that correspondence between such non-equivalent sub-frames be built based on such similarities.This dissertation identifies itself as a legal translation practice-based qualitative research,collecting data mainly from such corpora as China Laws & Regulation Database(CLRD),Pku Legal Database,Hong Kong e-Legislation,Ancient Chinese Corpus(ACC)in CCL and Corpusonline.This dissertation arrives at the following conlusions:(1)Approaches to the building of correspondence in translation of legal rules and regulations are representations of structural invariants with the frame of translation of legal rules and regulations,which can be further subcategorized into the approach to the building of correspondence between legal language sub-frames,the approach to the building of correspondence between legal language environment sub-frames,and the approach to the building of correspondence between translators' known knowledge sub-frames by perspectivizing the invariant relationship between the sub-frames evoked by prototypical values for each attribute and constraint with the frame of legal translation.(2)There are differences in basic components and hierarchies between legal language sub-frames,legal language environment sub-frames,and legal translators' known knowledge sub-frames,which would cause difficulties in following such approaches to the building of correspondence within the frame of translation of legal rules and regulations.(3)In approaching the building of correspondence between these different sub-frames in translation of legal rules and regulations,we need to first clarify the differences in basic components and hierarchies between these non-equivalent sub-frames,then pre-set the hierachical correspondence between these sub-frames and pinpoint the similarities therebetween.After that,we should keep on resorting to upper-frames in an upforward manner,until higher-degree correspondence can be achieved in terms of both the basic components and hierarchies of these sub-frames.This dissertation,adopts the theory of cognitive frame,and in terms of both the basic components and hierarchy of the cognitive framework,refines approaches to the building of correspondence within the frame of translation of legal rules and regulations,analyzes the factors causing difficulties in approaching the building of such correspondence,and proposes a frame approach to the building of such correspondence,which not only provides a new solution to problems of legal translation practice,but also broadens the scope of attention of theoretical studies of legal translation.