Legal draftsmen achieve the dual characteristics of thel egislative genre, viz. precision and all-inclusiveness, by the use of various linguistic devices, among which are (i) common words with uncommon meanings; (ii) binomial and multinominal expressions; (iii) nominalization; and (iv) qualifications. Whilst these four devices are very effective for their intended purpose, they often cause lexical, semantic or syntactic problem in the comprehension and translation of texts. This thesis explores, by analysis of the corpus, the different nature and extent of such problems caused by the above four devices in the translation of legislative texts from English to Chinese. Analyses in the thesis reveal that translation problems caused by the first two of the four devices mentioned above are mainly lexical in nature, though binomials contained in qualifications may sometimes also lead to semantic ambiguity. Translation problems arising from the use of nominalization or the use of qualifications are primarily semantic in nature, and are basically a problem of handling the various semantic units in the clauses. They can occur in both the comprehension stage and the actual rendering stage of the translation process. In the former, the problem lies in the difficulty in unpacking the various semantic units in the clauses, especially in the syntactically interrupted clauses where syntactic discontinuities are caused by the use of qualifications. in the latter, the difficulty lies in the syntactic re-arrangement of those units in the target language text in a manner syntactically acceptable to the target language while strictly in accordance with each semantic relationship intended by the source language text. Both the use of nominalization and the use of qualifications also give rise to some lexical problems. The analyses in the thesis also highlights some of the linguistic and extra-linguistic pre-requisites for a translator of legislative texts, for whom a good common sense and sufficient basic legal knowledge are as important as an extremely high level of proficiency in both the source language and the target language. / Master of Arts (Translation and Linguistics)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/235789 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Kwok, Wai Hung, University of Western Sydney, Macarthur, Faculty of Education and Languages |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Source | THESIS_FEL_XXX_Kwok_W.xml |
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