A Text-typology Oriented Study On Criticism Of The Chinese Version Of Legal Text Deed Of Covenants And Guarantee

The legal text Deed of Covenants and Guarantee is the example text, quoted byProfessor Li Kexing from Kong Polytechnic University when exploring the secretbehind legal translation in his two monographs, one of which is Legal text and legaltranslation, a key book of the10thFive-Year Plan of China, the other of which isLegal Translation: A Theoretical and Practical Approach. It is because the legal textis typical and representative that the legal text becomes the research object.From the perspective of text type, the research applies the theory of translationcriticism proposed by the German functional translation theorist Katharina Reiss, tothe analysis of the legal text Deed of Covenants and Guarantee. On the ground thatthe translated text is a text-oriented translation, the thesis takes into account the texttype of the original, the linguistic and extra-linguistic elements as well, to determinethe content-focused type of text and its applicable standard for criticism. Based on theanalysis of the original, the thesis mainly precipitates8lexical features,10syntacticalfeatures and4textual features, and delimits the textual function, text type andtranslation method of the legal text in view of Reiss‘s typology. Therefore, theexpected standard for translation criticism is to check whether the target text hasadequately and faithfully reproduced the content of the original. In accordance withthe analyses of both source text and target text, the thesis probes into the researchobject from micro and macro angle. The micro criticism exposes some inadequaciesof the target text: some colloquialisms, inconsistencies, disunity in use of translatedterms and mistranslations on the lexical level; improper placement of adverbials,confusion in logic of language, some poor fits in collocation, some mistranslationsand incomplete―de‖structures on the syntactical level. The thesis introduces theoperative mode of―basic grammatical analysis+sentence grapevines‘+bamboo joint‘map‖in legal translation. Besides, after deducting the operative mode from reference to clause9by reductive treatment the macro criticism shows that the translator does agood job in following the original faithfully by translating the source text in order ofEnglish. The criticism concludes that the translator better ensures adequacy of thetranslation to convey the informational content of the original legal text, but thosetranslation errors on lexical and syntactical level compromise the translation quality.In addition, the translator places focus on linear translation, without significantlyadjusting the original word order. However, the translator does not present relevantsolution to the cases where adjustment of word order is necessary.This research is a text-based practice on translation criticism. Reiss‘s texttypology bears a relatively high operability to translation criticism, and thecombination of text typology and translation criticism can provide an effectiveperspective for translation practice. This research also concludes that text type-basedtranslation criticism can be a means to improve translation quality,...