On Pragmatic Failures In Legal Translation

Over the last decades, growing emphasis has been placed on legal translation as a communicative and intercultural action, leaving behind such approaches as focusing on only linguistic aspects. In line with this trend, the present study focuses on pragmatic failures in legal Chinese translation.The present study focuses on pragmatic failure in legal translation, trying to find out what kinds of pragmatic failure are ubiquitous in legal translation, and how and why they occur. To reach the objective, a conceptual framework has been designed to study the pragmatic failures in legal translation. Then some pragmatic failures in legal translation are sorted out, categorized and analyzed according to the framework. In addition, some typical examples are also analyzed with a view to finding out what have caused these pragmatic failures in legal translation。It is established, after our analysis, that pragmatic failures in legal translation generally relate to two aspects: language and culture. At the linguistic level, firmly ingrained influences of mother tongue, translators' neglect of the implicit meaning the original Chinese contains, and translator's lack of proficiency in legal English lead to inaccurate and unequivalent, and sometimes, even incomprehensible translation. At the cultural level, the differences between legal systems, economic systems and even ideology, all contribute to misunderstandings, confusion, and mistakes in legal Chinese translation。...