English And Chinese Contract Laws: Contrastive Analysis And Translation

Considering that there are few in-depth studies on E-C and C-E legislative translation, the author tentatively explores the subject by making a contrastive study of the English and Chinese legislative languages, with a view to finding solutions to numerous problems arising from the translation of legislative documents. "The Chinese famous linguist Lu Shuxiang remarks that only through a contrastive study can we know the likeness and differences between the two languages, which definitely benefits us in translating" ( , 2002: 206).Guided by the methodology of contrastive analysis, the author has compared in this thesis the contemporary English and Chinese legislative documents first from a stylistic point of view. In the discussion of comparability, the emphasis is laid on the macro-level of text-structure; similarly, the discussion of text status is concerned with macro-elements such as overall situation and text function. The stylistic analysis, concerned with language use, diction in particular, follows the "top-down procedure" down to the micro-levels. Secondly, he dwells upon the methodology of legislative translation and makes a brief syntactic comparison between English and Chinese. Thirdly, he elaborates on the general linguistic features of English and Chinese legislative languages. And finally, he concentrates particularly on the comparison between English and Chinese contract laws in terms of the sentence structure.The author finds that the two languages under discussion display both similarities and disparities in expressing the same legal tenor. For example: both English and Chinese legislative languages are formal but ways to achieve formality are different. Chinese employs classical wording as a device to indicate solemnity while English uses various devices such as sentence structure to achieve the desirable effect. He also finds that word-for-word translation is, in most cases, inoperative and unpractical and proposes that content and style must match each other as the first rule to abide by in translating legislative documents. Although it is widely claimed that style is an important factor in translation, detailed discussions of its role are stillinsufficient in translation theories. Mary Snell-Hornby (2001: 119) points out that although both Nida and Wilss put style on a par with meaning or content, no coherent theoretical approach is attempted. The author argues that legislative translation should be guided by such stylistic features of legislative language as formality and solemnity, precision and explicitness, compactness and normativeness, which can well be regarded as principles of legislative translation.The author believes that this thesis will serve as a preliminary study of legislative translation based on contrastive analysis and hopes that it will arouse more interest in this field.