Semantic Construction Of The Legal Terms In The English Versions Of Han Shu From The Perspective Of Frame Semantics

Chinese classics contain a large number of cultural terms,which reflect the features of ancient Chinese culture and spirit and represent the essence of Chinese ideology.Being an important part of cultural terms,ancient Chinese legal terms provide human beings with a panoramic view of the legal system and the spirit of the rule of law in ancient China.Legal terms have specific meanings featured with distinctive national and cultural characteristics.In this sense,the translation of legal terms in Chinese classics is a great challenge.Charles Fillmore has put forward frame semantics,which may serve as a unique perspective for translation studies and also offers an interdisciplinary framework for term translation research.It emphasizes the importance of building semantic frames in translation to help target readers understand the source text.Frame semantics may also work as an assessment perspective to analyze the accuracy,readability and transparency of term translation in Chinese classics.As a Chinese classic with profound cultural connotations,Han Shu contains a large number of legal terms representing the sophisticated legal culture of ancient China.Thus,the parallel corpus referred to in this study is established by collecting the original texts of Han Shu and its two English translations,Courtier and Commoner in Ancient China: Selections from the History of the Former Han by Pan Ku by Burton Watson and The History of the Former Han Dynasty: A Critical Translation with Annotations by Homer H.Dubs.The thesis investigates the translation strategies of legal terms in Han Shu through qualitative analysis within the framework of frame semantics.It has found that there are frame differences between source legal terms and their translations in the target language which caused great influence on accuracy,readability and transparency of the translated versions of legal terms in Han Shu.Translation strategies adopted by Burton Watson and Homer.H.Dubs in translating legal terms include four major strategies as seen from the perspective of frame semantics:chunking up,chunking down,making implicit frames into explicit frames and creating new frames in order to build similar frames in the target text.These methods have effectively improved the accuracy,transparency,and readability of the translations for legal terms in Han Shu as well as do help target readers’ understanding of source terms.In addition,some translated versions are suggested aiming at the problem of mismatched frames between the source terms and target translations from the perspective of frame semantics.