The Translation Of English Legal Terms In The Process Of Legal Transplantation

Having experienced large-scale legislation, the legal system in our country has becomemore and more mature. One of the strategies to improve and perfect our legal system is legaltransplantation. Legal transplantation is realized by drawing from legal systems or legalconcepts of foreign countries. In this process, the role of translation can never be neglected.In fact, the difficulty of legal transplantation lies in the translation of legal terms, whichis the core of legal language. That is why the translation of legal terms has become one of themain subjects for legal language researchers. Whereas, the most important problem in thetranslation of transplanted legal terms is how the translator interpret the connotation of thelegal terms in the different legal systems and then transplant the legal terms from one legalsystem into another successfully.In a word, the significant role of the legal term translation in the law transplantationmakes relevant research on translation theory highly consequential. In this paper, the authormakes an exploration of the application of skopos theory in legal term translation in theprocess of legal transplantation through the case study of two legal terms’ translation.Apart from conclusion part, this paper can largely be divided into two parts. The firstpart, including the first three chapters, mainly deals with the research background and relevanttheory. Specifically, the first chapter will cover introduction to research significance, researchquestions, research objectives and methodology, in addition to data collection and thestructure of the whole paper. The second chapter is a literature review of skopos theory,including its origins, development and fundamental concepts. The third chapter is a survey oflegal terms and legal transplantation. Generally, this part provides the theoretical frameworkfor the whole thesis.The fourth and fifth chapters, in the second part, constitute the core of the whole paper.In these two chapters, the author analyzes the translation of transplanted legal terms from twoaspects: in theory and in practice. In Chapter Four, the author combines these three termstogether: legal terms, legal transplantation and skopos theory, and has proved the applicability of skopos theory into the translation of the legal terms in the process of legal transplantationand dwells on the factors the translator should take into consideration. Then, the author hasexamined the basic rules of skopos theory, which are used to guide the translation oftransplanted legal terms. In Chapter Five, the author explains how to apply the rules of skopostheory to guide the translation of legal terms in the process of legal transplantation throughtwo case studies.In summary, the author hopes she can make some contribution to the theoretical researchand practice over the translation of legal terms in the process of legal transplantation.