关键词: 顺应论; 顺应论翻译观; 顺应性翻译策略; 立法文本; 中华人民共和国侵权责任法; 法律英语

Abstract:

Legislative texts set the standards for the social behavior of people and stipulate the evidence necessary for judging illegal behaviors. Legislative texts, as normative texts among many legal texts, are of great significance for establishing social norms. The language in legislative texts is part of a precise legal language system, which is highly professional, formal, normative, logical, and rigorous. Among the numerous translations of legal texts, the translation of legislative texts is of universal academic research value. Based on adaptation theory and the translation perspective of the theory, this study takes Tort Law of the People’s Republic of China, which is closely related to civil rights, is of relatively greater academic reference value, as the corpus and all of the translation examples are selected from the website http://www.pkulaw.com. Using the research methods of example analysis and translation criticism under the guidance of adaptation theory, this article discusses the Chinese-English translation of legislative texts, and explores ways of applying the three compliance strategies of “form adaptation to meaning” “part adaptation to the whole” and “selection adaptation to the intention” in legal translation in the hope that the analysis will provide some guidance to the translation of legal texts, particularly legislative texts.

Keywords: adaptation theory; translation perspective of adaptation theory; translation strategies for adaptability; legislative texts; Tort Law of the People’s Republic of China; legal English