Case Analysis On Occupational Health And Safety Act Translation

Legal English refers to the normative language with special expressions used in the process of legislation and judicature.It is a language characterized by compulsion,accuracy and proceduralism after long-term development.In the vocabulary of legal English,there are multiple words borrowed from foreign countries and ancient times.Regarding sentence structure,it has long sentences and omitted structures.According to Tiersma's theory of legal linguistics(Tiersma 1999:139-41),legal texts can be divided into three categories: operative documents,expository documents,and persuasive documents.In the course of the translation of the OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY ACT,the author summarizes major difficulties in translating legal texts,including ancient words and specialized phrases,multiple paralleled sentences,and sentences with long clauses or non-predicate compositions.In response to these problems,the authoruses specific translation strategies to deal with them.They are addition and omission,negation and affirmation,conversion of part of speech,readjusting sentence order and dividing the long sentences into smaller phrases.Finally,some suggestions and ideas on how to translate legal texts properly are summarized.