Legal Translation As An Intercultural Transfer

Increasing globalization and integration of the world market economy and more internationalized social patterns of life have created the situation where a need for legal information from foreign countries and different legal systems is greater than ever before. Most noticeably, with China's stepping up its policy of reform and opening up to the outside world and its entry into WTO, it has become more integrated into the ever-changing globalization trend, and meanwhile legal translation is playing an ever-increasingly important role in international legal communication and transnational trade and business. All these have brought about lots of unprecedented challenges as well as opportunities to legal translation.There is no doubt that the exchange of information is largely dependent on language, which is intended not only as a system of symbols, but also as a means of communication and thus as a tool for mediating between different cultures. If we reflect upon legal language, we may find that properties of such a language have a major impact on the exchange of legal information or on legal communication. In fact legal language is the expression of legal identities that vary according to systems and countries, where different languages are used to express legislation, case law and doctrine as main components of various legal cultures.Eugene Nida, a distinguished American scholar on translation theory, once made the point "translation is an intercultural transfer. As far as the truly fulfilled translation is concerned, it seems more important to familiarize with both the cultures in question than to simply master the two languages, because it is only when immersed in a specified cultural context that words can make their sense."(Nida, Eugene A. 2001) In the lengthy historical development different nationalities have been bestowed with different customs and folkways, ways of thinking and social mentalities. The diversity of cultural dimensions and elements will inevitably result in the variation of the form of the language. All natural languages of human beings to some extent consciously or unconsciously reflect given cultural implications, and their language structures and communication modes are in one way or another influenced and restricted by respective national cultures. Imbedded with different ethnical cultural characteristics and cultural messages, law is closely connected with and inseparable from its relevant cultural traditions. Thus legal translation is a cultural transfer as well as a linguistic transfer, and it is supposed to be conducted to fulfill the social functions and legal authoritativeness of legal language bound by certain cultural elements.In the current multilingual and multicultural environment there is a significant need of common understanding and exchange of legal concepts of various legal systems mainly through legal translation, such as in the academic area, in the legal profession, in business settings even in the context of public administration services to citizens. Meanwhile there still is a strong pressure for the preservation of their basic sense and value as well as for the sake of diversity of legal culture. Both requirements are quite difficult to meet, complicated by the complexity of legal language and the variety of modalities used to express law within various legal systems.Unlike a number of technical and scientific disciplines where a fair correspondence exists between concepts across languages, serious difficulties arise in interpreting law across countries and languages due to the system-bound nature of legal terminology. In fact each legal order is situated within a complex social and political framework originating from the history, traditions and habits of a particular community. Multiculturalism or multilingualism in the legal domain is almost unanimously perceived as a very complex issue concerning legal translation. It is a highly debated topic not only among professionals and scholars of comparative law, linguistics, translation theory & practice, but also among government officials in institutional settings at national and international levels, and that is well demonstrated by the efforts made for the preservation and management of the plurality of languages in a number of countries and regions as a guarantee of cultural diversity as well as political stability. This is the case of Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Hong Kong and the European Union (De Groot 1998, Sacco 1991).In this thesis various aspects of multiculturalism in legal domain that are decisive to the development of cross-language legal information transfer will be examined. On the one hand, they are to be identified in the intimate link between language and law, covering the crucial issues of conveying legal concepts across languages, and on the other hand in the broad spectrum of comparative law issues, more precisely, in the relation between various legal systems. In fact every attempt to exchange and transfer legal information among different communities and to reach a potentially common understanding of different legal systems must inevitably cope with the problems posed by languages and the diversity of the systems. These topics are explored with a view to finding the extent to which the interrelation of language, law and culture influences and impacts on the development and performance of cross-language legal information transfer in a multicultural environment. And more significantly, some constructive approaches and methods to the improvement of operation and effectiveness of legal translation are introduced. Owing to all potential limitations caused by certain internal and external factors all of those are open to question and criticism, and also this thesis is expected to serve as a modest spur to induce others to come forward with his or her valuable insights into these topics.