The Differences In Translation Strategies For Legal Terms Of British Copyright Act

With Bourdieu’s theory of practice as an analytical tool,the thesis compares two translations of the British copyright law,short for Copyright,Designs and Patens Act 1988,and analyzes their differences in strategies for legal terms.The two translations are done by the translation team at LDD in Hong Kong and Zhang Dawei,a professor at Fudan University.From the perspective of sociology,the thesis reveals that in the field of legal translation,agents including translators and reviewers’ decision making is deeply influenced by their habitus and capital.The thesis does a literature review on legal translation,especially on key issues of total equivalence and semantic reference system.Then there is a record on the 30year-endeavor of legal translation in Hong Kong,in particular,the bilingual legislative translation project from 1989 to 1997,and a brief account of the legal translation in Chinese Mainland since the First Opium War.Both the record and the account indicate that legal translation promoted exchanges and transplantation of legal cultures.Later,the thesis gives a definition of and a summary of translation strategies for legal terms.Some mistranslations are included as well to reflect the complexity of legal translation and their possible impact.Legal translation in itself is a social practice,in which translators are always oriented by their habitus,and restricted by the volumes and structures of capital in their possession.After the literature study,an interview with Zhang Dawei and an analysis through Bourdieu’s theory of practice,the author found that the two teams differ markedly in the types of fields,habitus and structures of capital.With support from the government’s funding,from legal practitioners and from experts in law,language and translation,the team in Hong Kong is more than meticulous.Yet for Zhang’s team,on the basis of their years of legal translation,indepth study on copyright laws at home and abroad,and long-term exposure to English and Chinese,they are apt to be guided by their experience.Under the common law and the continental law systems respectively,the two teams employed different strategies for legal terms.In Hong Kong,literal translation and coinage are preferred to fix the terminological incongruity while in Zhang’s team,they picked out functional equivalents and Chinese renditions as the final translations from the copyright laws of Chinese Mainland and from the English-Chinese Dictionary of Anglo-American Law.For common terms,after researching into their etymologies and consulting linguists,Hong Kong translators decide to preserve the linguistic tradition while Zhang’s team,under the influence of Chinese Mainland’s linguistic habits,is inclined to choose the common translations of those terms.