Legal Translation: Based On Chesterman's Expectancy Norms

For a long term, fidelity to the source text is held as one of the most important principles for legal translation. However, target readers and the expectancy of target readers of legal translation are also the essential elements that translators shall bear in mind. In the past both in the realm of legal translation studies and practice, subject to the requirements of authoritativeness, accuracy and precision of law, translators are inclined to adopt the literal translation strategy with which it seems that the sentence patterns, language usage, expressions and thinking modes of the source text can be well preserved. Overemphasis on fidelity to the source text is indeed not conducive to the maintenance of precision of legal translation and sometimes may even result in certain absurdity in the expressions and thus mislead the target readers to some extent. Anyhow, this paper maintains while fidelity is significant in legal translation, reader's expectancy shall never be ignored or looked down upon.A great many translation theorists have appealed for paying heed to the target readers, among whom is Professor Andrew Chesterman of the University of Helsinki who has put forward the theory of expectancy norms. After reviewing the development of Chesterman's norm theory, this thesis thoroughly examines legal translation theoretical evolution from fidelity to the source text to the emphasis on the expectancy of the target reader. It firstly figures out some leading features of legal English at lexical, syntactical and stylistic levels with a contrastive study of legal Chinese and legal English, urging translators to attach much more importance to the expectancy of target readers than ever before. The present study maintains that Chesterman's theory of expectancy norms as is widely used in literary translation can be properly applied to construction of a theoretical framework of legal translation and it is expected to be conducive to legal translation practice. Furthermore, the strategies of achieving reader's expectancy and basic requirements for translators are also observed here.Indeed, in legal translation process, the translator should not only strive to be faithful to the source text but also pay much attention to reader's expectancy. Only in consideration of the two aspects can legal translation be well done.