A Study On Translation Of International Treaties From English Into Chinese

This thesis is a study of the translation of international treaties from English into Chinese at syntactic level.The author attempts to borrow general translation theories and linguistic methodologies to analyze the translation of treaties. To be more specific, the speech act theory in Pragmatics, communicative approach and Nida's three-stage translation procedures are combined to construct the theoretical framework..It has long been debated in legal translation circles whether the translation should be literal or free. On the one hand, the legal translator should be faithful to the content and form of the ST. On the other hand he should also conform to the norms of the TL. Neither literal nor free translation can fulfill the requirements. Therefore, legal effect has been brought into the picture as the essence of communicative approach. The transfer of legal effect serves as the bridge between the first step of analysis and the third step of restructuring of our translation procedures.From the analysis of the English version and Chinese version(s) of four international treaties, i.e. Charter of the United Nations, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and United Nations Conventions on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, the author summarizes the prepositional content and function-indicating devices of various legal speech acts in treaty text. She also draws conclusions from comparing the ST and the TT. The conclusions are as follows:Firstly, the treaties have their conventional formula and are relatively stable and fixed in structures. The Chinese translation of treaties should conform to the formula of the ST in order to bear the equivalent legal effect.Secondly, there are cases where translators could be creative in theirtranslation, adopting function-indicating devices non-equivalent to that of the ST but to achieve the equivalent legal effect.Lastly, in settling the debate on "literal Vs. Free ", the author argues that both are indispensable to the translation of treaties, the scale of literalness or freedom should be controlled. There is no way for word-for-word translation, and the translation should be confined within the limit of the communicative approach.