The Pragmatic Analysis Of Legal English Translation

Pragmatics is the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader). The pragmatic analysis of translation is an approach designed to comprehensively analyze language used by means of pragmatic theories. Translation is a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communicative activity. Its aim is to achieve the maximal equivalence in meaning. This paper puts forward the pragmatic approach to legal English translation, generally speaking, to make maximal application of pragmatic principles both in the understanding phase and the reproduction phase in order to achieve pragmatic equivalent effect in legal English translation.This paper describes and analyzes the stylistic features of the English version of the Maritime Code of the People's Republic of China at the lexical, syntactic, and textual level using the theory of modern pragmatics and the view of context, deixis and speech act theory. It is expected that these description and interpretation may shed some enlightening light for understanding and translating these codes and documents of other similarities, and will pose further research questions in the study of legal language.The paper includes three parts. The first part is an introduction, including two chapters. Chapter One provides a detailed introduction to the development of translation studies and pragmatic studies, indicating that the application of pragmatics to translation will shed new light on translation studies. Chapter Two is a tentative study on legal English and the development of legal translation. At the end of the chapter, the author concludes that a good translation of legal English should concern pragmatic elements. The second part constitutes the main body of this thesis. It provides a comprehensive pragmatic analysis of legal translation. By giving proper vivid examples, the author introduces some pragmatic theories including context, deixis and speech act theory. This part is composed of three chapters, and each chapter is a study on one theory. Most of these examples are originated from the English version of the Maritime...