Translation of National Legislation: A Case Study of Family and Succession Law of the ROC Civil Code

• Main Authors: Tseng, Shih-Han, 曾詩涵
• Other Authors: Lai, Ping-Yen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/k92582

碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 翻譯研究所 === 105 === In the age of globalization, the demand for legal translation has increased significantly since interactions between individuals and between countries cannot function without law. In recent years, more attention has been paid to the translation of national legislation. Non-Anglophone countries have translated their legislation into English to give foreigners more access to their laws, which at the same time facilitates comparative law and cross-cultural understanding. This paper first introduces the scenarios for translating national legislation and the status of translated texts, pointing out that the incongruity between legal systems poses the biggest challenge to legal translation. Then, terminological problems are explored, comparing the advantages and disadvantages of functional equivalents and linguistic equivalents. Legal translation is special in that law is in the language. Therefore, understanding the features of legal language and legal English can promote better practice of legal translation. This paper presents a case study of the English translation of family and succession law of Taiwan’s Civil Code. In order to assess the quality of the translation, error analysis is conducted to examine terminology, fidelity, grammar, usage, naturalness, coherence, the gender of personal pronouns, editorial errors, and textual conventions. Research findings show that inconsistent terms, severe fidelity errors, and an abundance of grammatical errors are the greatest translation problems that need to be addressed.