ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches the translation of legal terms from socio-legal contexts by describing and exploring their meaning-making process in Chinese legislative translation through Chinese–English parallel corpora. The meaning of a legal term exists in a sign system and may be interpreted within its relevant socio-legal contexts and through the interaction with other sign systems. The whole process of the translation of legal terms has three steps: the delimitating of a legal term, the understanding of a legal term, and the translating of a legal term. By describing terminological translation within and beyond different jurisdictions, this study explores the meaning-transfer process of Chinese legal terms from a corpus approach. The essential tasks for legal translators are sometimes to create – not simply to find – legal equivalence, by dealing with the incongruity caused by different languages, different legal systems, and different social and cultural configurations as well as the inconsistency in translating a legal term and in achieving its transfer from one sign system to another sign system. The aim of legal translation, with the translation of legal terms as the core, is to ensure equal authenticity, particularly in bi-/multilingual jurisdictions, then equality within a given context where they are used, and finally achieve a balance between language diversity, justice, and human rights, that is, diversity and integrity as “harmony in difference”.
