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Translation of Legal Terms in a View of Functional Equivalence

Author: ZhangRong
Tutor: XiongDeMi
School: Southwest University of Political Science
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: legal translation translation of legal terms functional equivalence translationprinciples
CLC: H315.9
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2012
Downloads: 43
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Abstract

It is known to all that the activity of translation is difficult. However, among thosetypes of translation, legal translation is probably regarded as one of the major difficulties,which is largely reflected in the translation of legal terms. That how to convey the meaningof legal terms in the source language system precisely is a big problem yet to be solved inthe field of legal translation. Besides, seeking equivalence in the legal terms is viewed asone of the hot concerns of legal translators. Among tremendous amounts of translationtheories,“functional equivalence” is deemed as one of the most efficient translationtheories for the translation of legal terms.In consideration of the significant guidance of functional equivalence on legaltranslation, based on this theoretical framework, and by selecting the translations of majorlegal terms in the three English versions of the General Civil Law Act of the PRC (issued in1986) as source materials, this thesis makes a systematical contrastive analysis of legalterms and their English expressions in the translations from the following aspects. Firstly,with the contrastive researches on both meaning and form of legal terms, this thesisconcludes that it is better to resort to some translation principles in the process of legaltranslating in order to realize equivalent translations, especially for the translation of legal terms. Secondly, this thesis makes some adjustments of the theory to suit specialcharacteristics of the translation of legal terms, and summarizes some principles such asthe priority of contextual consistency is over verbal consistency, functional equivalenceover formal equivalence, the written form over the heard form, and the forms of languageover the needs of audience. Lastly, the thesis tentatively proposes some special principlesfor the translation of legal terms from the aspects of professional, consistency, accuracyand equivalence. As far as this thesis is concerned, legal translators have to enrichthemselves with professional knowledge first and then probe into legal translation, whileduring the process of translating, they shall both transfer the meaning precisely and unifymeaning and background legal culture, and eventually realize the closet equivalence of thesource texts and the translated texts.In sum, when combined with special characteristics of the translation of legal terms,the theory of functional equivalence is of greater significance as a guiding theory. At last,this thesis is supposed to serve as a catalyst for further activity of the translation of legalterms and researches on guiding principles, in order to promote the quality of legaltranslation.

Translation of Legal Terms in a View of Functional Equivalence

Abstract

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