Considerations in Translating Chinese Legal Texts

With the accelerating globalization of the world economy, international exchanges concerning law become more and more frequent; and legal translation, the means for such exchanges, is gaining ground in importance for translation of other special-purpose texts. This paper discusses and compares the various lexical, syntactic and discourse-level features of the English and Chinese legal language. The translator should render literal and faithful translation based on the exact linguistic features of the target legislative language and with the complete understanding of the equal legal meanings and function achieved, in both the source and target texts, through the exact rendering of linguistic elements in the target legislative text.