A Report On Translating Equipment Exportation Contract

With the growing commercial business between China and foreign countries, business contract translation is becoming increasingly important. Contract translation has become one major text type that many translation companies and translators undertake. Based on some contract translations, the author finds that undertaking the translation of this text type is a good opportunity to cultivate a translator’s professional quality.Taking a Chinese equipment exportation contract as research object, the present report introduces the whole translation procedures of this selected contract, ranging from the analysis of the source and target languages before making attempts to translate it, the employment of appropriate translation methods and strategies to the revision of the initial translation version. Combining the analysis of the text characteristics of the source text and syntactic differences between the source and target languages, the report discusses the strategies in translating adverbials and modifiers commonly used in the long and complicated sentences in a contract, and proposes specific methods to resolve syntactic ambiguities which may arise in C-E translation of coordinate components.Conclusions are made after the translation is completed:(a) To convey the precise meaning of the source text, literal translation is the principal method adopted in this translation;(b) In order to emphasize the timeline of an action, the position of adverbials has a fixed and established order;(c) The difficulty in translating a contract rests in attributes, which demands a translator to make close analysis of the sentence structures of the source text and clarify the internal relationship of each element in a sentence.(d) Syntactic ambiguities may arise in C-E translation of coordinate components. By adding a serial comma or a demonstrative determiner, the ambiguity can be resolved.