While in China, the Book of Changes in China focuses on the relations between symbols and thoughts. Until the 19th centuries, semiotics grasps people’s eyes. But it develops slowly because of the terrible international situation, turbulent national condition and different cultural background. Now experts have utilized it to explore different issues in order to have a new angle, such as Chen Hongwei. Professor

Chen  (1996)  gives  the  criterion  of  translation — correspondence     in meaning and similarity in function, namely equivalence.

2.2 Previous Studies on the Translation of Legal Terminology

In the West, legal translation begins earlier, with a relatively perfect theoretical framework. In the legal field, foreign scholars are mainly occupied in the comparative study and legal texts. In the comparative study, it mainly involves different languages and  cultural background from one symbol system to another, that is decoding and coding. Legal texts are mainly the discussion of the characteristics and the principles of translation. Although western experts have achieved great achievements, their studies are fragmented. They pay little attention to legal terminology. The level of translation is not high and can’t meet the public needs totally.

Though legal translation starts later in China, it still has achieved some achievements. Li Defeng and Hu Mu (2006) take the Chinese translation, China Science and Technology Translation and Shanghai Science and Technology Translation as the source of statistics from 1980 to 2004, and they find that there are 54 legal translations, but the translation of legal terminology accounts for only 18%.

At present, legal terminology is an important carrier of the concepts of law. Therefore, if there is no in-depth understanding of legal terminology, there cannot be a more accurate translation. Some scholars, such as Xiao Yunshu(2001), explore the practice of legal translation and point out that legal terminology is mainly focused on two major problems— misinterpretation  and  inaccurate  translation.  The  studies  are    also fragmented and do not have a systematic framework. For instance, Cheng Le (2013) points out that the meaning of translation triangle theory can be pided into referential meaning and connotation meaning.After the emergence of social semiotics approach to translation, many scholars apply this method to legal translation. They want  to achieve the equivalence between meaning in translation to maintain the effectiveness of legal terminology. For instance, Chen Le (2008) explores the legal terminology from the perspective of social semiotics.

2.3 The Semantic Triangle

The semantic triangle is the view of linguists Ogden and Richards (1923). They think semantics can be interpreted as the relationship between the following three parts: (1) referent；(2) sign or concept；(3) interpretant. Since then, scholars in different fields have conducted multi-perspective studies of the meaning of linguistic symbols. For instance, Leech (1981) pides meaning into seven types of research.

Chinese scholar Cheng Le (2013) describes the relationship between linguistic sign, meaning and referent. The relationship between linguistic sign and meaning is arbitrary, and the linguistic sign itself has no specific meaning in the real world. Accordingly, he proposes the translation of the triangular relationship, including the source language of the language symbols, the meaning of the source language and the target language symbols.