A Comparative Study On Chinese And English Business Contracts

Whether it is a small scale business transaction or a large international deal,contracts form the basis of how parties come to a common understanding and form an agreement that allows them to engage in business activities.The contract is a fascinating document for the mere fact that it can contain a cross-section of language – from everyday language,to legalese,technical terms,and even archaic language.In this study,a cross-linguistic comparison of contracts drafted in Chinese and English is undertaken,with the goal of discovering how these two different languages differ in terms of contract drafting and what types of defects can occur in the drafting of both types of contracts.Specifically,this study analyses both the words and expressions as well as the fixed expressions used in contracts,and also uses a content analysis method to analyse contracts at the level of the text.A combination of both quantitative and qualitative techniques have been used to carry out this study,including the use of the Python programming language and Wordsmith Tools to sort through each of the contracts.The initial historical background behind contract drafting in China and English-speaking countries finds that borrowing of terminology from different languages has occurred for both Chinese and English contracts,with Japanese French,German and English all having influenced Chinese,while Latin and French have played a dominant role in influencing language used in English contracts.In terms of linguistic variation,it can be seen that both Chinese and English exhibit some degree of variation in the use of terminology used in contracts.The analysis of the words and expressions used in contracts finds that while both Chinese and English consist of relatively formal language,English is arguably more formal in tone due to its use of archaic language and tendency to use repetitive language.Chinese contracts are dominated by the use of nouns,including nouns to express both concrete concepts and abstract concepts.Affixes in contracts are an important consideration for L2 Chinese learners,as the study results show how an affix can be used to produce a large number of new words all of which were found in the Chinese contracts.Similarities are found between Chinese and English.At the level of words and expressions,both Chinese and English contracts proved to be both precise and standardised but also vague at times.In the Chinese contracts,whilst a number of terms were found that represented direct translations from English,there was also use of terms in Chinese contracts that have been directly translated from English using a different technique,involving taking two separate concepts in Chinese and joining them together.This exemplifies the wide variety of ways in which Chinese legal and business language has come to evolve.The English contracts showed a tendency to use a significant number of nominalisations,but upon closer inspection of them,many of them could be redrafted to be expressed more simply and more reader-friendly.The same can be said for many of the verbs used in the English contracts.However,due to the long history of Legal English,many terms used in contracts have become fixed expressions that are still used despite the unnecessary complexity.This study found a larger number of fixed expressions used in English contracts as compared to Chinese contracts.Finally,in terms of the overall structure of the contract,it was found that there was a more detailed structure used in the English contracts as compared to the Chinese contracts.