Translating conjunctive cohesion in legal documents, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology

Abstract

The proper use of conjunctive cohesion in legal documents is very important in configurating the logical flow of translations. However, this phenomenon has not drawn enough attention from researchers. From the perspective of logic production and reproduction in legal texts, this paper investigates the use of conjunctions in legal documents and their translations and discusses how conjunctions help the logical flow of information in legal documents. Based on the cohesion model developed by Halliday and Hasan (1976), the present research proposes seven categories of conjunctives for investigation and compares the conjunctive patterns between two legal subgenres, namely prospectuses and legislative texts, through a corpus-based approach. The findings show that conjunctive patterns in the two subgenres are different from one another in wording and frequency and in the use of translation methods. Specifically, the conjunctives tend to become implicit in the translation of prospectuses but explicit in the translation of legislative texts. It is argued that possible causes for the disparities include cross-linguistic differences and extra-linguistic factors, such as generic, socio-cultural and translators’ strategic differences.