Abstract
AbstractLegislative texts include mainly those legal documents such as laws, regulations, and treaties in writing, reflecting the legal intent of state power by means of linguistic expressions. The primary functions of legislation are to impose duty and to confer power and these functions are realized through deontic modality, that is, modals and related patterns which convey obligation, prohibition, and permission. Palmer’s observation that modality is one of the features varying the most across languages leaves a promising space for legal translation studies, in that large discrepancy between the source language and the target language would require translators to make appropriate choices when translating terminology and phraseology related to deontic modality. After a survey of the distribution features of deontic modality in Chinese legislation, the English translation, and non-translated English legislation respectively, this chapter conducts a case study of translators’ decision-making for the English translation of Chinese legislation in regard to deontic modality. A parallel corpus is built with the newly formulated Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China and its official English translation offered by the National People’s Congress, as well as a comparable corpus of the Civil Code of Louisiana State in the USA. It is found that Chinese legislation has much more explicit modal markers than its American counterpart, and is more prudent in its tone when imposing obligation but shows more determination when imposing prohibition. Explanations are provided by referring to the drafting guidelines issued by the legislature of the respective country. As for the actual decision-making of legal translators, recurrent patterns are identified and illustrated in both a quantitative and qualitative fashion. Results show that the translators are inclined to mitigate strong deontic modality and to transform implicit modalities into explicit ones when translating from Chinese into English, for the purpose of striking the right note in the target language.KeywordsDeontic modalityCivil codeLegislation translationCorpus-assisted
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