The Selection Of Sentence Subjects In Chinese-English Legal Translation

Chinese language is topic prominent contrasted to English language, as the latter is a kind of subject prominent language, therefore, in the translation from Chinese into English, translators usually have to transform the topic-comment structure to the subject-predicate structure, whereas in the translation from English into, Chinese, translators need to do a reverted transformation. So determining the subject and topic is the first step in translation process at sentence level, which may directly exert great influence on the translation effects and the language function. As senior translators, we must be proficient in determining subjects and topics, and put them into good use proficiently. Considering the vital differences between English and Chinese, in the language transforming process, it is usually not easy to determine a proper part to be the subject of the target language for us, therefore, to determine the best subject is turned to be the research topic to be paid great attention to. Based on the analysis to the style and language features of legal documents, this paper points out that translators should give priority to the style equivalence in the process of legal translation, and moreover, with my personal legal translation practice, this paper indicates that in Chinese-English legal translation, when we select legal subjects, full consideration should be taken into consideration to "informative" and "form focused" features. And in subject selection process, translators should pay close attention to information quantity. When translating fixed legal documents, translators should comply with the fixed translation patterns, and use fixed subjects. Legal language is a kind of instrumental language distinguished from everyday common language, as legal English is featured in formality in style of writing, and old English words are widely used, and it has longer sentences and trimness sentence structures as well. In legal English, passive voices are widely used, which is for the manifestation of fact prominence, and substance matters are likely to be selected as sentence subjects. In the process of Chinese-English legal translation, translators should take the above mentioned legal English features, and select sentence subjects for translations. In the process of subject selection, we must take the subject features of target language into account, so this paper probes into the subject patterns of English, and based on the legal translation of more than one hundred legal documents and the legal documents I once translated, this paper analyzed different kinds of subjects used in the translation of legal documents, and the functions they performed in Chinese-English legal document translation. This paper, after contrasting the topic-comment structure of Chinese and subject-predicate structure of English, summarized the topic determination principles and represented the transformation from topic-comment structure to subject-predicate in legal documents.The paper, offering a contrastive analysis to the topic-comment structure of Chinese with subject-predicate structure, makes a systematic analysis to legal document and legal language. In the end, it reached a governing principle for Chinese-English legal document translation. The guiding principles are as follows:(1) For zero subject sentence, translators must append a subject.(2) Subjects should be the predominant information in the sentence(3) Subject must conform to the thinking models of English and American people(4) Subject must conform to the logical collocation of English(5) Subject must conform to needs of passage development(6) For the legal documents with fixed forms, translators must select fixed subject(7) To avoid using formal subject...