| Translating Chinese legal classics into English is one of the major means to promote traditional Chinese legal thoughts and legal culture to the world.Although the translation studies of Chinese classics have made great progress through years of development,the translation of Chinese legal classics fails to receive due share of attention.And fewer scholars concern themselves with the problem of legal effect of translation of Chinese legal classics or give consideration to the instrumental and documentary orientation in the translation of Chinese legal classics.The study of the translation of legal terminology in ancient Chinese legal classics will not only broaden the research scope of Forensic Linguistics,but also benefit the future translation practice of Chinese legal classics,and more importantly,contribute to the publicity of the traditional Chinese legal culture and legal thoughts.In view of this,this thesis takes the legal terminology in Da Qing Lü Li and its two translations as the research objects,combines the theory of congruence and incongruence and the theory of instrumental and documentary translation and presents a comparative analysis of the typical terminology in criminal law,civil law,procedural law and basic and feudal law.At the same time,this thesis analyzes the different choice of translation strategies of the translators from aspects of social factors,translator identity,and purpose of translation.It is found that the similarities and differences between translations of legal terminology can not only reflect the similarities but also the differences of different legal systems and legal development processes.From the above analysis mainly concerning the diction,social background,identity of translator and purpose of translation,it is found that Staunton's translation can be attributed to instrumental translation,which takes legal effect of the terminology into consideration,and William Jones' s translation can be attributed to documentary translation,which aims at keeping some aspects of the original code unchanged and at the same time adds some useful annotations for the convenience of researchers.Staunton's translation directly entered the judicial practice.And William Jones' s translation received high status and became one of the three basic materials for westerns to learn about traditional Chinese law.The findings of the thesis imply that it would be more appropriate to conduct instrumental translation in the translation of legal terminology in legal classics,since an instrumental translation would pay more attention to the legal effect and the function of the texts.Instrumental translation can provide more specific guidance in actual translation practices,and such translation strategies as borrowing functional equivalents and employing neutral terms for descriptive paraphrases or definition are suggested to be employed during the translation.In theoretical research,the analysis of legal terminology in legal classics should also consider the factor of legal effect of the terminology although the code is no longer effective.At the same time,this thesis also suggests that further research can be conducted on textual or non-verbal aspects of legal documents. |
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