The Influence Of Professional Background Knowledge On Translators’ Performance In Chinese-to-English Legal Translation

Scholars at home and abroad have strong disagreements on whether professional background knowledge is an important part of a translators’ translation competence. Their opinions fall into three groups. The first group believes that a translator with a command of terminology can translate a specialized text. The second group holds the view that translators should have systematic knowledge in a specific field. While the third group deems that professional knowledge is of little importance, and what really matters is the translators’ ability to understand and fulfill the requirements of translation tasks. All the above viewpoints have no support from experimental data. To provide evidence, the author intends to conduct an empirical study and probe into the influence of professional background knowledge on the translators’ performance and reasons behind it.This study is designed to explore the influence of legal knowledge on translators’ performance from the perspectives of translation errors, translation speed, and translation revisions made during the translation process. To conduct the study, the author has firstly reviewed previous researches on characters of legal translation, translation competence and performances. Secondly, the author designs an experiment and collects primary data concerning translation performances made by translators with different background knowledge levels. Thirdly, the author marks the test materials and all translation documents on the basis of the Tree Model of Legal Discourse Information, and conducts the comparative analysis to get the figures of the frequencies of translation errors made by translators with different background knowledge level in various types of legal texts. In this paper, the author measures subject’s legal background knowledge level based on the results of his or her pre-test questionnaire. Fourthly, the author uses correlation analysis on translators’ background knowledge levels and their translation performances. Fifthly, the author summarizes the reasons behind the correlations according to the results of the experiment and post-test interviews.The author finds that terminology error has been made with the highest frequency, followed by grammar error, omission error, discourse error, function error and addition error, and is most likely to be made in private legal text. Furthermore, it is of small possibility that background knowledge level has influence on the amounts of translation error made by trainee translators. Moreover, background knowledge has no necessary correlation with translation speed. Last but not least, the level of legal background knowledge has no necessary correlation with the amount of revisions made by the subject in the process of translation. The results of this paper are going to prove the validity of previous conclusions or opinions on the role of background knowledge in translation performances, and to provide new research perspectives and statistics for future studies.