並列摘要
Legal translation is a double operation consisting of both legal and interlingual transfer, with the legal aspect constituting the principal part of the work. Regardless of the type of text involved, all legal translators must deal with the problem of terminological in congruency under conflicting legal systems. Translation of English legal terms of art into equivalent Chinese has been proved to be especially challenging not only because of language differences but also because of the fundamental differences in legal concepts and principles between the Anglo-American system and the civil law system prevailing in Taiwan, Republic of China, which is modeled after German and Japanese laws. This paper aims at introducing the theory of “dual functional equivalence,” which calls for both effective linguistic transfer of the communicative function of the source text and the nearest equivalent transfer of the legal effects of the Source document. The writer also recommends solutions on how to tackle the problems involved in terminological translation through the process of conceptual analysis and equivalence comparison by taking into consideration the essential characteristics of the source term vis-a-vis a potential Chinese target term.