Linguistic and Translation Features in Legislative Texts: A Comparable Corpus-based Study

This study describes the linguistic variation between Chinese legislative translations and American legislative texts through self-built comparable corpus. Such description is both quantitative with multi-dimensional analysis of 54 linguistic features and 5 dimensions, and qualitative, including the underlying interpretation of those linguistic differences among two texts. This study finds that these differences exist not only between legislative register and other general registers, but also between five dimensions. With the deep discussion from the legal perspective, these findings could benefit the linguistic understanding of national powers and human rights, legal translation practice and further linguistic variation studies.