On Translator’s Subjectivity In Legal Translation: From The Perspective Of Deconstructionism

Nowadays, legal translation as a kind of translation for professional use hascaught more attention than before. However, owing to its specificity, the translator inthe translation process has been considered as “servant” for a long time, and his maintask is to transcode the source text just on the language level. Thus his subjectivity hasbeen neglected for a long time. Legal language and legal culture in different legalsystems are inevitably different, so it is necessary for the translator to exert hissubjective initiative in legal translation in order to complete more successful legalcommunication. Even though some researches have been done on translator’ssubjectivity in legal translation, most of them just put focus on the study of legalterminology, lexicon or other linguistic aspects.Therefore, this thesis aims to explore translator’s subjectivity in legal translationfrom the perspective of deconstructionism, which, as a brand new translation school,has contributed to emphasizing the importance of translator and endowed himunprecedented subjective status by raising a series of important ideas, such as“differance”,“trace”,“death of the author” and “rewriting”. Through applying themethods of description and illustration, this thesis analyzes the translator’s significantsubjectivity in legal translation in the light of deconstructionism, mainly from twoaspects: the translator’s subjective choices of legal source texts and the translator’ssubjective choices of the specific strategies in legal translation.First, according to the idea of “defferance”, translation produced in differentcontexts always represents a specific historical, cultural and social life, translatorsshould choose source work in a purposeful way to meet the needs of society andculture, from which translator’s subjectivity can be clearly demonstrated. Second,since deconstructionism claims that there is nothing outside the text and what presentin front of the translator are just the signs themselves without fixed meaning, themeanings all depend on the translator’s rewriting of the original text. Due to the openness of the original text, the translator gets more freedom to apply his subjectivityto choose translation strategies he prefers. The most commonly used strategies in thisthesis include addition, deletion, domestication, alteration on formats of legaldocuments, and sentence reconstruction.Implication was discussed for translator’s subjectivity in legal translation fromthe perspective of deconstructionism；and recommendation was also made for thefurther study of the combination of deconstruction theory and legal translation practicein the future.