A Corpus-based Comparative Study of Two English Versions of The Civil Code of the People's Republic of China——With Specific Reference to the English Translation of Terms Concerning Parties to Civil Legal Relations

Based on the self-built Corpora of the Civil Code, this paper makes an intra-/inter-linguistically comparative study of the two English versions of The Civil Code of the People's Republic of China from the aspects of linguistic parameters and the English translation of legal terms concerning parties to civil legal relations.The research findings suggest: (1) Linguistic parameters of the two English versions of The Civil Code of the People's Republic of China are quite similar, both of which are close to those of the English version of the German Civil Code; however, there are significant differences between linguistic parameters of the two English versions and those of the Corpus of US Supreme Court Opinions (SCOTUS) and the legal sub-corpus of the British National Corpus (BNC).The major reason for this is that Anglo-American civil legal texts belong to case law instead of statute law, which prefers descriptive judicial discourses to prescriptive code discourses.(2) With respect to the English translation of terms concerning parties to civil legal relations, both English versions are faithful to the original, and mainly adopt correspondence strategy with a rather small proportion of simplification and explicitation.In addition, there are some differences in diction between certain legal terms of the two English versions, and in some rare cases, both English versions fail to maintain the consistency of translated terms.