A Corpus-based Study on the English Translation of Modal Verbs in Chinese Legislative Texts

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201127.092How to use a DOI?

Keywords

modal verb, legislative text, corpus, speech act

Abstract

From the perspective of speech act theory, based on the self-constructed composite corpora, this paper analyzes the English translation of modal verbs commonly used in Chinese legislative texts. The results show that: the top three modal verbs used in legislative texts of Mainland China are “yingdang (应当)”, “keyi (可以)” and “bude (不得)”, which are different from those used in Hong Kong and Taiwan; there is basically no problem with “keyi” to be translated into “may”, but there are problems with the translation of “yingdang”, which is suggested to be translated into “shall” or “should” according to its different legislative meaning. Most of “bude” is translated into the negative form of shall/may, but it’s proposed to be translated into the negative form of “may” because of its high modal value. The study points out that modal verbs should be translated accurately according to the illocutionary force of the legislative text, so as to convey the true legislative intention of the original text to the greatest extent, and consequently to improve the quality of legal translation.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Huiqian Fan
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/11/28
TI  - A Corpus-based Study on the English Translation of Modal Verbs in Chinese Legislative Texts
BT  - Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Education, Language and Inter-cultural Communication (ELIC 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 461
EP  - 465
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201127.092
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201127.092
ID  - Fan2020
ER  -