Legal English And The Functionalist Approach To The Translation Of Chinese Legislative Texts

Legal translation is a complicated transference between two different languages. Therefore, it should be done on the basis of a good analysis of the features of legal languages, which proves to be very important. So far as legal English is concerned, scholars in the field of law or linguistics both at home and abroad, such as Chen Zhongchen, Henry Weihofen, Anna Trosborg, have made remarkable achievements in the studies on legal English as well as legal translation. As legal translation covers a wide range across legal systems, cultures and languages, this thesis, analyzing the lexical, syntactic and stylistic features of the English legislative text, aims to discuss the English translation of Chinese legislative texts by a case study and offers some suggestions for legal translation.First, the thesis makes a detailed analysis of the lexical, syntactic and stylistic features of legal texts. It demonstrates that the legal texts are lexically characterized by the highly frequent use of common words with uncommon meanings, especially big words or archaic words from Old English and Middle English, words and phrases from Latin or Old French. In addition, legal texts also frequently use technical terms, words and expressions with flexible meanings, rare adoption of pronouns and coordination of synonyms or near-synonyms. In terms of syntactical features, legal texts are full of coordinate construction, long and complex sentences, high mobility of adverbial elements, complicated attributive structures, use of nominalization, modal auxiliary (shall) and the passive voice. And their stylistic features are precision, formality, impersonality, and consistency. All these linguistic features provide legal English with uniqueness, which is a crucial factor for our selecting an approach to translation and making legal translation evaluation.Then, the thesis shifts its attention to the discussion of the principles for legal translation—accuracy, consistency and simplicity. It argues that in doing legal translation, the translator should attach great importance to the function and readability of legal texts as well as creativity to some degree in transference. Different from many prescriptive researches which are made microcosmically "from the partial to the whole", this thesis adopts a descriptive macrocosmic method of the functionalist approach to legal...