Chinese Criminal Law Terminology&Its English Translation:from The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

Legal terminology translation is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks in the field of translation. Both the inherent elitism and discrepancy of legal cultures of the SL country and the TL country lead to an insurmountable barrier for legal translators. It is well acknowledged that the primary criterion for legal translation is accuracy. Nevertheless, where the true meaning of legal terminology in a legal text cannot be accurately transferred, accuracy is but a dream. Indeed, being a basic unit of meaning in legal language, legal terminology is always a high-level concentration while dealing with legal phenomena and matters, and also a conundrum as well as challenge legal translators have to confront with.The criminal law is the basic law for protection of citizens’ personal rights and property rights, whose position in international legal communication is self-evident, which, however, due to problems occurring in the process of translation of criminal law terminology such as legal cultures’ variety and lack of equivalents, might be hampered. In order to solve these problems, this author, setting out from discussion of Nida’s functional equivalence theory, takes consideration of the characteristics of the Chinese as well as English criminal law terminology, and proposes corresponding translation strategies and techniques.Apart from introduction and conclusion, this thesis is mainly composed of three parts. In the first part, a brief review of the development of equivalence theory is provided for, and then the author describes Nida’s functional equivalence theory in detail and introduces its application in legal translation. In the second part, by exploring the composition of Chinese and English legal terminologies, the author sums up the characteristics of Chinese and English criminal law terminologies, tending to pave the way for examination of the strategies of translating Chinese criminal law terminology into English. In the last part, equivalence between Chinese and English criminal terminologies is divided into three levels from the perspective of form, i.e. full equivalence, partial equivalence and nonequivalence. Then based on the classification, the author discusses how we can have basic functional equivalence achieved at the three tiers in translation of Chinese criminal law terminology.