Comparative Study On English Versions Of The PRC Enterprise Bankruptcy Law

Since China entered into WTO, the connection in economy between China and the rest of economic entities and countries in the world has been enhanced. Enterprise, as a major unit in economic system, plays an important part in national economic development. Continual and fast development of the enterprises is based on the consummate legal system. Law of the PRC on Enterprise Bankruptcy adopted at the 23rd Meeting of the Standing Committee of the tenth National People's Congress on August 27,2006, was hereby promulgated and took effect as of June 1,2007. Translation of legal texts is responsible for getting the world to know the law system in China. Therefore, legal translation has been a focus for many linguists and translators at home and abroad.The thesis offers a comparative study on three versions of the Law in which the features of legal English are emphasized again and proved in details. Meanwhile, the criteria of legal translation are reset from the perspective of functionalist translation theory. The three versions provide some specific examples for analysis and the rules to be followed by legal translation have been conducted. Also the problems found in the process of study have been figured out. What's more, research has been placed on applicability of functionalism into legal translation, and the author presents a detailed comparative study on the versions of the Law both in the macro and micro aspect.The thesis is composed of four chapters.The first chapter gives an introduction to the background and significance of Enterprise Bankruptcy Law. Here, three translation versions of the Law are presented. One is issued by China Legal Publishing' House (herein refers to V1), which is taken as the official version, the other two are obtained from the Internet. One of them is released by Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM version, herein V2), and the other one is from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on Internet (WIKI version, herein V3). Meanwhile, the analysis of the current situation of legal translation makes it clear that research of legal translation is a valuable and necessary job for translators and linguists.The second chapter introduces the history of legal language and analyses features of legal language in translation versions of the Law. Features of legal language is presented at three levels:lexical, syntactic, and textual. These features are already explored by linguists in this field. The laborious job done by the author here is to list the specific examples in the Law.In the third chapter the author concentrates on one argument which has existed in translation field for years both at home and abroad. The argument is about the applicability of functionalism to legal translation, especially skopos theory. Some hold the viewpoint that functionalism goes against legal translation. While, others argue that functionalism is none other than a perfect translation theory for legal translation. The author prefers to the second opinion and conducts research to prove it.There is a comparative study on the three versions in chapter four. Two forms are presented to show differences in the versions of the Law in details, which can be regarded as a complementary part to chapter two.In the end, it comes to the conclusion that compared with the traditional translation theories, functionalism, especially skopos theory is the proper strategy to make comments on legal translation. With a detailed comparative study on the versions of the Law, the author takes V1, the version by China Legal Publishing House as the most feasible one.