Comments On The English Translation Of The Regulations Of The PRC On International Maritime Transportation

The promulgation of the Regulations of the People' s Republic of China on International Maritime Transportation on January 1st 2003 symbolizes that China' s international maritime administration has officially stepped into the era of legal system, which reflects China' s further opening-up of the shipping market since her accession to WTO and exercises positive influences on the industrial development of administrative reforms. Although the Regulations is another milestone shipping legislative document after the Maritime Code of PRC, its tentative stipulations are inevitably commented and questioned by various legal experts and shipping operators. However, few people have made the relevant analyses from the linguistic angle. The language issues should be given the utmost priority during China' s integration into the international customary practices. In addition, there do exist quite a few parts in need of discussions in the English translation of the Regulations. Such parts will directly cause impact upon the daily shipping operation, foreign investment and even China' s profile in the international shipping circle. Therefore, the author has, in light of the accumulation of translation experience, made comments and analyses on the English translation of the Regulations for appropriate corrections and endeavored to find some regularity in the translation of legal documents as well.During the thesis work, the author has accomplished the perusal of scores of linguistics and translation reference books, especially on the translation of legal English so as to summarize the basic features of legal English and some issues in the translation of legal English that are worth considering. This thesis focuses on the comments on the Regulations with the linguistic knowledge. These comments are divided into several components: the lexical aspect falls into the misuse or improper use of words, particularly the shipping terminology; the syntactic aspect concentrates on the inappropriate sentence structures; the stylistic aspect includes the comments on the solemnity, seriousness and formalness of English laws and regulations as well as some suggestive solutions to stylistic drawbacks in the English translation. Moreover, the difficult points are illustrated through the contrastiveanalysis of the differences between the Eastern and Western culture and modes of thinking. The author of the thesis has never made judgment at his own discretion and therefore has found the corresponding English rules and regulations for reference of the defects and mistakes as detected in the Regulations, which makes the thesis more persuasive.Through the analyses, the author has made overall comments on the English translation of the Regulations and obtained some principles and regularity in the translation of legal documents. During the one-year hard work, the author has come to see the urgency to improve the study of translation of legal English in China because there are far less reference materials for the study of legal English as compared with those for English literature. Moreover, the defects and mistakes in the Regulations should be avoided. As a postgraduate student with major in the professional English translation, the author has made tentative probe into this field and thus sincerely hope to make contribution to the shipping industry and translation theory and practice in China.