A Corpus-based Study On Lexical Translation Issue Of Chinese Laws

Corpus has been increasingly used in researches of applied linguistics both theoretically and technically,but corpus –based legal translation studies emerge as a recent topic.Strong statistical and retrieval capabilities make corpora a very convenient tool for legal translation studies.This thesis focuses on the lexical translation problem in Chinese laws Chinese-English aligned corpus.The corpus includes 234 Chinese laws and the English translation text.Based on previous study results by legal translation experts as Chen Zhongcheng,Jin Chaowu,etc,this thesis discusses four issues: the in-conformity of legal terms in translation;inaccuracy of some lexical translations;mix of synonyms;semantic prosody conflict in translation.The author tries to find a more proper way of translation,with the help of two comparable corpora---United States Code database and Corpus of Contemporary American English.The author finds that: 1.Some legal terms’ translations in Chinese laws are not exclusive,the same terms are translated differently in the same title or in other titles.2.Some lexical translations are not accurate,the author finds that there exists some collocative clash.3.Some synonyms’ translations are mixed with each other,the author holds that the synonyms in general language are very different in legal language.4.The author finds that some translators often ignore words’ semantic prosody which lead to semantic prosody conflict.Finally,concrete suggestions on translation refinement have been carried forward,aiming to reduce systematic misuses in legal translation and improve the translation quality to make it conform to native English.Through this thesis study,a conclusion is drawn that translators’ uniformity awareness is weak.In the fourth chapter,with the problems in our law’s translation,according to predecessors’ studies,some suggestions to improve these conditions are put forward: Legal terms’ translation need to be amended by specialized organs to make it standard and systematic,legal translation shall be processed by professionals,legal words dictionary’s publishment should be valued,professional and authoritative legal terms corpus should be built for references.