法律语言及语体特点

Linguistic and Stylistic Features of Legal English in T ranslation

Abstract

With the quickening process of globalization of the world economy and after China‟s WTO accession, legal English, as a kind of professional English, is progressing rapidly in our country which is surely having more links with other countries in the world. Undoubtedly, there will be more and more legal documents that need to be translated. Legal English is a particular expressing mode and criterion formed gradually developed through a long process of judicial practice. To do well in the translation of English in law, it is crucial to understand its features. It has vivid features in words diction and sentence structure, and embodies the specialty, sobriety, preciseness and veracity of the legal language .

This paper, from the point of linguistics and stylistics, analyses the present situation of legal English, elaborates the features of English in translation of legal documents and summarizes its major stylistic features: accuracy, vagueness and speciality. It reiterates the idea that translation of legal documents requires the grasp of its linguistic features so it also explores those linguistic features in a systematic way .

Key words: linguistic features

stylistic features

legal English

translation

.

1.Introduction

“Legislative writing has acquired a certain degree of Notoriety rarely equaled by any other variety of English. It has long been criticized for its obscure expressions and circumlocutions，long-winded involved construction and tortuous syntax，meaningless repetitions and archaisms. To the specialist community these are indispensable linguistic devices which bring in precision，clarity，unambiguity and all- inc lusiveness and so on. However，to the non-specialist this is a mere ploy to promote solidarity between the members of the specialist community and to keep

non-specialists at a respectable distance and is hence regarded by them as nothing more than pure linguistic nonsense bringing into professional discourse pomposity, verbosity, flabbiness and circumlocution.”(Bhatia，1994:136)

This is a judgement given by Vijay Bhatia about the linguistic features of legislative writings in the first paragraph of his works Cognitive Structuring in Legislative Provisions. It talks about both the specific and unique lexical and syntactic features of the legislative text and also how these linguistic features count from the specialists and non-specialists perspectives. In recent years，there has been a continual process of simplification of the legislative language in the English-speaking countries.

However, despite these efforts at simplification and clarification, the gap between legislative text and everyday text is still very wide. Present day legislative text retains its identity as a highly specialized and distinctive text type or genre of English. The legislative texts of the legal systems