2012年第13次学术讲座--Translating Legal Terms: A sociosemioticconstruction

语料库与跨文化研究系列讲坛之六

讲座名称：Translating Legal Terms: A sociosemioticconstruction

讲座人：  香港城市大学程乐博士

讲座时间：2012年10月9日上午10：00                                  

讲座地点：外语楼111报告厅

演讲者简介：

Dr. Cheng Le, having MPhil in law, MPhil in linguistics, PhD in Language and Law, and Postdoc in English for Professional Communications, is the Chief Editor of International Journal of Law, Language & Discourse and Secretary General of Multicultural Association of Law and Language. He iscurrently a visiting assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong, and an adjunct professorat Zhejiang University and China University of Political Science and Law. His interests and publications are in the areas of language and law, legal translation, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and semiotics.

演讲内容梗概：

In a sense, legal transplants (Watson 1993) from a linguistic perspective basically deal with legal terms; as to the basic glossary (frequently-used common words with general meanings) and other words, it is easy to find equivalence for them because of the language universality. Quite different from general translations, the transplanted legal terms are strange or unmatchable to the target discourse community (Cheng 2010, 2012). Therefore, absolute lexical equivalence could not be found in terms of translation in legal transplant (Cheng and Sin 2008), which means the major task of translation in legal transplant is to solve lacunae, a lexical gap in the target language. In legal translation, a lacuna seems to constitute a factor of untranslatability (Sin & Roebuck 1996). Nonetheless, a case-based study as shown in this paper enables to argue that terminological equivalence can be achieved by a semiotic approach (Cheng 2010, 2013; Cheng & Sin 2008; Cheng, Sin & Cheng 2013), which emphasizes the relativity of a signifier and a signified (Cheng & Sin 2008) on the one hand and respects the semiotic rules, such as the principle of productivity, and principle of solidarity (Cheng & Sin 2008) and the semantic reference scheme (Cheng & Sin 2008; Sin & Roebuck 1996) on the other. Such an approach will provide a fresh insight into legal translation both theoretically and practically.

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   语料库与跨文化战略研究院

     2012年9月