English-chinese Legal Translation: An Economy Principle Approach

Given the disparities in legal systems in an increasingly globalized world, legal translation plays an important role in solving the disputes involved in foreign affairs and legal communication and cooperation between countries and regions. As a special type of text authorized by state and government, legal documents have the regulatory power of guiding social life. Owing to this authoritative formality, legal translation demands translators'precise translation to ensure the same legal effect and social guidance in the target context. More and more scholars at home and abroad have realized that legal translation has become an important research topic and started to engage in it. And varied studies have been conducted from many angles. Generally, most of the previous studies have focused on micro-level translating skills for individual words and sentences in an attempt to contribute to legal translation. This dissertation approaches legal translation from the perspective of pragmatics, and puts forward the Economy Principle of Language in English-Chinese legal translation with a hope to improve the later translations. Based on the argumentation of the coherence of the requirement of legal translation and the core idea of the Economy Principle, the study illustrates its viewpoint with a comparative study of two Chinese translated versions of the British Family Law Act. Through the study on how the Economy Principle can be put into practice in E-C translation at lexical, syntactical and textual levels, the author believes that it is positive to the perfection of the future Chinese versions.Under the guidance of the Economy Principle of Language, legal translators should make efforts to cost readers the minimum time and energy in comprehending the target texts without any loss of the source information. That is, the target text will use the most concise language possible to express the original legal message and represent the legal effects. But this objective is difficult to the translators due to the obstacles in legal translation, which involve a good command of legal knowledge, legal difference and legal language, which are certainly great challenges for them. The findings of this paper are reliable and practically valuable: the employment of Chinese legal terminology, maintenance of unified translation of legal terms, borrowing of formal Chinese characters, rearrangement of the complicated long sentences, and employment of the Chinese DE-structure will contribute to the English-Chinese legal translation studies. The author believes that the comparative analysis of the two Chinese translated versions and the summarization of the translation strategies will help promote the future legal translation practice.