An Aesthetic Analysis Of Legislative Texts Translation

With the advancement of our country’s laws and regulations, there has been a growing need for legal translation. Though some translators have stived to account for legislative texts translation by applying some translation theories, such as the equivalence theory, communicative translation and skopos theories, there are always some exceptions that are out of the explanatory power of these translation theories. It is necessary to explore a new thinking mode to study legal translation, especially the legislative texts translation. Aesthetics of Law as an interdisciplinary of Law and aesthetics provides us a new perspective to study the legislative texts translation. Besides, in2011, Mr. Liu Miqing mentioned "the trend of translation back to aesthetics" in the preface of his book. That points out a new direction to translation study. The combination between aesthetics of law and translation aesthetics would make up the gap of legal translation now.Legislative language as the most authoritative language contains lots of aesthetic value that worths our study. Based on the theories of translation aesthetics and support from aesthetics of law, the paper first analyzes the feasibility, the aesthetic value of legislative texts. By contrastive analysis, the paper believes that there are four beauties contained in legislative texts:concision, symmetry, preciseness and logic. Thus, it’s the responsibility of translators to represent the aesthetic value of the source texts in the target texts. Through detailed examples from Penal Code of Fenland and General Principle of Civil Law of PRC, the paper analyzes the difference of translations caused by whether the aesthetic value of source texts in target texts has been preserved or not. From the comparison of different translations, the paper believes that by preserving aesthetic value makes a high-quality legislative texts translation, which is, for translators, the process of translation is not merely a dull process of rendering law information from one language to another, but a process of perceiving, converting and polishing the beauty; for the aesthetic subject—readers of legislative texts, reading the translated legislative texts is not merely for grasping legislative texts information, broadening their horizons, but together with experiencing aesthetic enjoyment. Findings shows that full understanding of the source texts is very fundamental and necessary, which demands translators not only to have a good command of the meaning of the text, but also own the aesthetic ability. Then, translators make every effort to represent the aesthetic value in target texts to the utmost through concrete methods, such as, the accurate usage of legal terms, proper arrangement of sentence structure and formulated structure.