Mr Kevin Hongbo Zhang
Overview
- Name:
- Mr Kevin Hongbo Zhang
- Email address:
- hongbo_zhang@soas.ac.uk
- Thesis title:
- English Translation of Negative Structures in Chinese Legal Texts: a Corpus-assisted Study
Internal Supervisors
PhD Research
China has been making great efforts in the rule of law and translating those laws and regulations is becoming increasing important with China’s reform and opening-up to the outside world and the globalisation. Translation of legal texts is a special and specialised area of translation activity since it involves law and does produce not just linguistic but also legal impact and consequence, therefore it is required to be accurate and free from ambiguity and vagueness, which is particularly hard to achieve between Chinese and English because of their distinctive linguistic features (and two different legal systems that will not be dealt in the research).
Negation is outstanding among all the differences between Chinese and English. The form and use of negation in English is quite different from that of Chinese. Appropriate reconstruction of negative structures in the process of translating Chinese legal texts to English sometimes can be a matter of life and death, and is of particular significance. Negation in Chinese has been under intensive study for decades, and the most common and important negators in general texts are “bu and mei (meiyou)” . However, in the trial version of A Parallel Corpus of Chinese Legal Texts compiled by Singapore Corpus of Research in Education which contains 113 Chinese legal texts and their translations, mei is far less than bu in the search. So it deserves special attention to research on the negators widely used in Chinese legal texts.
The key research questions of the study are “What are different features of negative structures between Chinese legal texts and general texts?” and “How are those three types of negation (the scope and focus of negation, transferred negation, and double negation) translated into English?”.
The current research is to adopt the corpus-assisted methodology to investigate, specifically in the context of Chinese legal texts, the categories and uses of negators, compare and contrast the differences in negative structures between Chinese and English legal texts, identify inherent rules and offer solutions to the better reconstruction of negative structures in Chinese-English translation. The research is to compile a Chinese-English parallel corpus (around 1.5 million words in total), and analyse the data with the help of corpus tools of CLAWS, ICTCLAS, Wordsmith and Paraconc. The research will segment Chinese legal texts, annotate both Chinese and English negators, align the texts and analyse the data. Within the theoretical framework of corpus-assisted translation studies and facilitated by well-developed corpus technology and tools, the research can take account of attested data, guarantee better objectivity and expect a bunch of fruitful findings.
The current research has multiple significance: the identification of linguistic features, particularly in the exploration of negation in Chinese legal texts, a specialised genre, will contribute to the standardisation of legislative language and elimination of linguistic ambiguity in the legislation and judicial practices; the proposed corpus, the first bilingual corpus of legal texts, will contribute to the methodology of corpus-assisted translation studies; and the well-aligned bilingual texts can be imported into translation memory of popular translation software such as SDL Trados and improve the efficiency and accuracy of practical translation of legal texts.
