A Research On The E-C Translation Of Legal Documents

On the diplomatic conference held in 1980 in Vienna,representatives of 62 countries unanimously agreed to accept a convention titled “The United Nations Convention on contracts for the International Sale of goods”(Which is instead by CISG in following passages)promulgated by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law.It came into effect on January 1st,1988.The whole convention includes four sections: the scope of application,the formation of contracts,the sales of goods and the final provisions.Taken the Convention as subject matter,the present thesis explored the general principles for legal documents based on systematic analysis on the features of legal documents at lexical and syntactic level,and on the text typology as well as the text function.The thesis focused its attention on exploring methods for the translation of condition sentences in the Convention.Normally speaking,these sentences are characterized by it length,complexity and modality.Research indicates that the Convention used large number of loan words,doublets and common words with unusual meanings in legal context,and that the Convention also used a number of nominal expressions,long and complex sentences and passive voices.Unsurprisingly,most of the long and complex sentences are conditional sentences,normally introduced by subordinators such as “if”,“where”,“when”,“in case” and so on.Meanings of these subordinators are quite different from those when they are used in daily English context.A variety of approaches are proposed for the translation of these subordinators.Research also indicates that modal verbs like “shall”,“may”,“must” and etc.expressing responsibilities and obligations have meanings quite different from those in daily English context,and that these modal verbs shall be translated in a manner quite different from normal translation.A series of approaches are proposed for the translation of these modal verbs in conditional sentences.