On English Translation Of Chinese Legislative Texts-A Comparative Analysis At Syntactic Level

In terms of linguistics, legal English is a functional variety of English with a specific vocabulary based on the common core of the English language, which is formed and used in the activities of legislation and judicature. Therefore, legal English has its own distinctive syntactic characteristics.With its entry into the WTO, China will involve itself in the world's economy more profoundly and widely. In the highly legalized contemporary society, laws are closely concerned with people's economic activities. Overseas investors in China need to learn about China's laws. Thus, translation of Chinese legislative texts attracts many people's attention. On the basis of theoretical research and translation practice, many scholars and translators probe into techniques for the translation Chinese legislative texts into English.However, there has been no systematic concrete research in comparison of Chinese and English legislative texts and this kind of translation. This paper attempts to focus on this issue and carry out some research.This paper includes five parts.The first part is an introduction of the necessity of research of legal English and the aim of this paper.The second part is literature review. It includes a brief introduction to law, legal language and legal English. After classification of legal language, this part introduces the scope of legislative texts and the history of law translation in the West and in China.The third part is the main body of this paper. On the basis of a reviewed definition of syntax, this paper refers to the syntactic features of English and Chinese legislative texts. As for syntactic features of legislative English, this part focuses on the preponderance of declarative sentences, complete sentences, long sentences, parallel structures and the expression of modality and the coexistence of passive and active voice. Among these features, the application of long sentences is analyzed in detail, including the adverbial clause of condition, adverbial clause of time, adverbial clause of manner, adverbial clause of purpose and the attributive clause. As for syntactic features of legislative Chinese, the author reviews and analyzes the aspects of declarative and imperative sentences, long sentences, parallel structures and topicalized sentences which include no-subject structure,"…的"structure and prepositions of"对"and"对于". Then, the author carries out a comparative analysis and illustration in three aspects, that is, SV in English vs. TC in Chinese, voice and word order.The fourth part is a combination of the theory and translation practice. With a brief review of the concept of equivalence and the principle of equivalence of legal effect, corresponding to the three comparative points of legislative English and Chinese, the author proposes some English translation techniques of Chinese legislative texts on the basis of translation examples.The fifth part is conclusion.