Translating into Topic Chains in International Laws: a Corpus-based Study of English-Chinese Translation Shift

Abstract This study explores discourse restructuring in English-Chinese legal translation, focusing on the translation shift to Chinese-specific topic chain clauses. Using data from a parallel English-Chinese legal corpus, this research reveals that the shift from English “subject-prominent” clause combining to Chinese topic chaining is influenced by the textual status of the English grammatical subject. Parameters for determining textual status include semantic animacy, discourse saliency and position within the schematic structure of the genre. The more marked the English grammatical subject is according to these parameters, the higher its textual status, the more likely it is to be translated into Chinese as topic chaining clauses into sentence. The study argues that topic chain translation accounts for universal translation shifts, including explicitation, implicitation, and reference tracking shifts. It proposes that topic chain translation is the “hybridization” strategy adopted by translators to preserve the specific legal coherence of the source text while aligning with the linguistic and communicative norms of the target language. This makes translation shifts predictable. Viewing “translation as legal action” emphasizes the recreation of meaning, considering extra-linguistic factors relevant to the genre-specific discourse community. Topic chain translation offers a practical approach to achieving equivalent communicative purposes in the target genre, thereby facilitating the “text translation” of morphologically structured languages like English into Chinese, which is characterized by a freer word order. The corpus and empirical findings of this study can inform the teaching of legal translation and the development of algorithms in machine translation to assist in generating or annotating appropriate clause combining structures. The study also calls for further investigations into discourse restructuring in legal translation, particularly at the intersection of language contrasts, legislative contexts, and genre conventions, where the effective recreation of international legal reasoning occurs.