On The Defects Of English Translation Of Chinese Statutory Laws And The Coping Techniques

With China's playing an increasingly important role in the development of the world politics and economy, the rest of the world needs to know more about China's statutory laws. That, together with China's fulfillment of its commitment to translate the Chinese laws related to the world trade which is made in the Report of the Working Party on the Accession of China to the World Trade Organization, drives the English translation of Chinese statutory laws to a very important spot. Therefore, the writer of this thesis takes the English translation of Chinese statutory laws as the focus of discussion in this thesis. And because the structures of English and Chinese statutes are nearly the same at the textual level, this thesis concentrates on the discussion only at the lexical and syntactic levels.As far as translation of Chinese statutory laws is concerned, it is quite necessary for translators to master the features of legal English if they want to ensure that the translated texts sound like legal texts but not, say, novels or personal letters. Thus this thesis first discusses in detail the features of legal English at lexical and syntactic levels.Mr. Li Kexing states that neither a single Chinese translation theory such Yan Fu's "faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance" nor a single western theory such as Nida's "dynamic equivalence" can ideally direct translation of statutory laws, so the writer of this thesis adopts in Chapter 3 of this thesis four translation principles that translators should follow, i.e. the principle of preciseness, the principle of consistency, the principle of conciseness and the principle of reader-orientation. As far as the writer knows, the principle of reader-orientation is put forward as a principle of legal translation for the first time.In order to get a true picture of the current English translation of Chinese statutory laws, the writer of this thesis scrutinizes the translated version of more than a hundred Chinese laws in a series of seven books published by Law Press in 2007. Assessed by the principles listed above, various defects, though a small portion compared with the vast volume of legal translation in China, scatter in the translated version of Chinese statutory laws. The writer of this thesis makes a detailed discussion of such defects in Chapter 4. In order for translators to avoid similar defects in future translations, the writer of this thesis finally proposes some translation techniques at the lexical and syntactic levels. Bearing in mind the specific features of legal English and the translation principles, translators are sure to avoid translation defects and yield more satisfactory translations with the help of the translation techniques proposed in this thesis.